Latest in Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)
We’re using FOIA to find out if the intelligence community feels like it’s being pressured to reach certain conclusions—and, if so, how that’s impacting employee morale.
Our latest FOIA lawsuit.
One of the great political mysteries of the last few weeks involves what has happened to the possible criminal indictment of former Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe, who is accused of having made false statements regarding his role in certain leaks to the media relating to the Hillary Clinton e-mail scandal.
In his lawsuit against the Justice Department filed last week, former FBI agent Peter Strzok made an arresting claim:
Last year, one of us filed a “meta-FOIA” request with Benjamin Wittes seeking information on how former CIA officer and then-congressional candidate (now congresswoman) Abigail Spanberger’s unredacted SF-86 form was released in response to a right-wing advocacy group’s FOIA request. We petitioned both the National Archives and Records Administrations (NARA) and the U.S. Postal Service (USPS), each of which had played a role in the release.
In July 2017, Privacy International and Yale Law School’s Media Freedom & Information Access Clinic (MFIA) filed a lawsuit against the National Security Agency, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), the State Department, and the National Archives and Records Administration seeking access to records related to the Five Eyes alliance under the Freedom of Information Act.
Since its enactment in 1966, the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) has served as a significant source of transparency in government, allowing anyone to access official records that would otherwise be unavailable to the public. Legal academics have analyzed the statute in numerous law review articles, most of which seem to embrace FOIA’s underlying goals. Yet the actual use of FOIA and its state-law equivalents in legal academia has been quite limited.
Yesterday evening, we received a response to one of our FOIA requests asking whether anyone has sought or received internal ethics guidance on Whitaker’s involvement in the Mueller investigation.
We’re using FOIA to find out whether the acting attorney general has consulted with career ethics experts on his involvement with the Mueller investigation. If not, that could be a major red flag.
Inquiring minds want to know.