Websites hosting major US climate reports taken down

That's hopelessly naive. A "misconfiguration" is the excuse they use after the fact when there's enough outrage that they have to put things back the way they were.

I'm not being hopelessly naive. It's certainly possible that they took it down with the explicit intention of hiding information on the internet, but that would also be pretty stupid, since various articles have found the reports on other government servers. So I assume incompetence before malice.

What's already known is that they fired the staff who prepared the report, and are presumably shutting down the agency. Is it really surprising that someone might have turned off the webserver before transferring the domain?

Yes you are. If you’re arguing in good faith then you should try to answer this question:

How far does it have to go before you assume malice? Do they have to tell you “I am malicious”? And if someone malicious is using the “dont admit it” strategy are you fucked?

You are being repeatedly pummeled in the face by a gang of bullies and responding by pondering whether or not they may be continually assaulting you out of some kind of misunderstanding. lol

Did you read the article? The administration's excuse / explanation is that it's not illegal to remove data because it already exists elsewhere:

> said the information will be housed within NASA to comply with the law

So you think they'd accidentally misconfigure DNS, then explain that the site has been brought down because they comply with the law some other way? That doesn't make any sense, and suggesting this might just be a mistake in light of this information just makes you seem like an apologist.