Education Department altered employees’ emails to blame shutdown on Democrats, lawsuit says

By Nate Raymond

(Reuters) -A federal workers’ union filed a lawsuit on Friday challenging the Trump administration’s alteration of furloughed U.S. Department of Education employees’ out-of-office email messages to include language blaming Democrats in the U.S. Senate for the government shutdown.

The American Federation of Government Employees in a lawsuit alleged the administration violated employees’ free speech rights under the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment by co-opting their email correspondence to force them to “recite partisan words that they would not have spoken otherwise.”

The complaint filed in federal court in Washington, D.C., said the out-of-office email responses are crafted to appear as if the employees are speaking in the first person, suggesting the language should