David Holland has asked me to post some details of a letter he has received from UEA via WhatDoTheyKnow. David is away this evening.
The letter appears to be a direct response to the guest posting here yesterday and can be seen here. It outlines two errors in UEA's recent FOI response, although only the first appears significant to me. This is the key excerpt:
In response to your question “Please tell me the names and positions or job titles of all UEA employees that had access to a copy of my Russell submission or Boulton’s annex”, we responded as follows:
“The University never received directly a copy of your submission to the Russell Review. We only had access to the information included with Prof. Boulton’s letter to Keith Briffa”.
This is incorrect due to a misunderstanding on my part. While the University itself did not receive a copy of your submission from Muir Russell, Professor Keith Briffa acquired a full copy of your submission by way of a request made to you by a third party.
The submission of Professor Briffa and Dr. Osborn in response to the letter and annex from Prof. Boulton was drafted specifically to deal only with those issues that were put to them by Prof. Boulton. In providing their response they showed the annex in a format that could be clearly linked to your submission to the Russell Review to explicitly demonstrate that your allegations had been formally considered.
The "request made...by a third party" presumably refers to the copies of the unexpurgated version of the submission that David handed out on request after Muir Russell refused to publish it. Apparently some 150 copies were distributed.
So the new version of UEA's story is that Russell sent a redacted version of Holland's submission to them - the redactions removing key pieces of evidence to support Holland's case. UEA had access to the full submission, but only referred to the evidence in the redacted version in their reply to Boulton.
IIRC, Russell claimed to have given full consideration to Holland's allegations, but it seems clear that this is not true, since no response was sought or obtained on the key evidence (which I'll post about tomorrow). Russell would seem to have a great deal of explaining to do as to why he removed this information.
The hole that UEA and their colleagues on the Russell panel are digging is getting steadily deeper and deeper. I wonder when they will decide to call it a day?