TRANSPARENCY: Think tank to sue Treasury to make carbon tax proposal emails public.

A conservative Washington think tank will file suit Tuesday seeking to force Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner to make public more than 7,300 internal emails circulated in recent months among senior executives in his department about a carbon tax proposal officials say taxpayers don’t need to know about.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute will file the suit in federal district court tomorrow because Treasury Department officials denied the non-profit organization’s request for a waiver of reproduction fees under the federal Freedom of Information Act.

Treasury officials also told CEI that the cost of photocopying the emails in order to make them public would not be worth the cost because doing so “would not significantly inform the public about the operations or activities of government.”

There would be no reproduction costs, however, because, according to CEI, the non-profit told Treasury it would accept an electronic version of the emails.

It’s almost like the Treasury was acting in bad faith.