FOIA News: FOIA lawsuits a threat to our democracy, opines watchdog

Op-Ed: FOIA lawsuits a threat to our democracy, insult to our time

Chris Krug, Watchdog.org, Sept. 21, 2017

Let’s talk about time, if only for a moment so as not to waste too much of yours.

More precious than gold, more fleeting than beauty, nobody who’s living a life worth living has an excess of time. Whether it is God, family, work or community, we’re allocating our time to things that further the American way.

So I don’t flinch when I read stories about low attendance – or no attendance – at community board meetings, legislative hearings or any other kind of governmental activities that legacy media outlets rag on the public for not showing up to watch it.

We the people, well, we’ve got other things going on. We simply do not have the hours in a day to be present to watch government work (or not work). We trust that it is functioning, but verification is a must.

Read more here.

Court opinions issued Sept. 19, 2017

Hall v. DOJ (D.D.C.) -- ruling that; (1) DEA, ATF, and Criminal Division performed reasonable searches for records concerning plaintiff; (2) plaintiff failed to exhaust his administrative remedies with respect to request to Bureau of Prisons; and (3) Executive Office for United States Attorneys failed to indicate how agency responded to request re-directed to it from Criminal Division.

Murray v. Shulkin (D.D.C.) -- dismissing FOIA and Privacy Act case because: (1) Department of Veterans Affairs fully disclosed plaintiff's claim file; and (2) plaintiff failed to identify documents that agency allegedly falsified, and plaintiff failed to request amendment of such document prior to bringing lawsuit.

Summaries of all opinions issued since April 2015 available here. 

Court opinions issued Sept. 18, 2017

Bloche v. DOD (D.D.C.) -- finding that Air Force properly relied on Exemption 5 to withhold certain (but not all) disputed records pertaining to federal government's use of interrogation tactics designed and implemented by medical professionals.

Wilson v. DOJ (D.D.C.) -- concluding that Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives performed reasonable search for certain records pertaining to plaintiff's criminal case.

Summaries of all opinions issued since April 2015 available here. 

FOIA News: Oral argument scheduled in FOIA lawsuit for release of draft Clinton indictment

Push to unseal the draft Whitewater indictment against Hillary Clinton gets court date

Teresa Welsh, McClatchy DC, Sept. 20, 2017

A federal appeals court will hear a case brought by Judicial Watch on Friday to make public draft indictments of Hillary Clinton from the Whitewater scandal in the 1990s.

Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group that files Freedom of Information Act requests, wants copies of the documents that the National Archives and Records Administration has declined to release. It filed a FOIA request for the documents in March 2015 and in October 2015 the group sued for the 238 pages of responsive records.

Read more here.

Judicial Watch's press release available here.

FOIA News: DOJ-OIP Releases 18F "Discovery Phase" Report

OIP and 18F Release Report on the "Discovery Phase" of the National FOIA Portal and Ask for Your Continued Participation with Development

Dep't of Justice, Office of Info. Pol'y, Sept. 20, 2017

Today, OIP is pleased to announce the results of its collaboration with GSA’s 18F team on the discovery phase of development of a National FOIA Portal.  As we enter development, we want to again solicit both public and agency participation in providing feedback on our work.

The FOIA Improvement Act of 2016 directed the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) to build a “consolidated online request portal that allows a member of the public to submit a request for records . . . to any agency from a single website.”   In April 2017, the Office of Information Policy (OIP) announced its partnership with the General Services Administration’s (GSA) 18F team to create a consolidated online request portal.  To begin the project, OIP compiled a team with members including its own FOIA subject matter experts, 18F’s digital services team, and technical staff from DOJ’s Office of the Chief Information Officer and contractor support.  The team began by embarking on a “discovery phase” that included conducting extensive research, interviewing requesters, agencies, and the advocacy community, and testing prototypes of possible functionality.  The discovery phase focused on four categories of potential functionality:  the ability to submit a request to any agency, interoperability (i.e., making the new portal work with other existing systems), generating status updates, and the option to search for already released records.

Read more here.

Report available here.

FOIA News: DOJ-OIP Releases Training Schedule for Federal Employees

First Slate of FOIA Training for Fiscal Year 2018 Now Available

Dep't of Justice, Office of Info. Pol'y, Sept. 20, 2017

As part of its responsibility to encourage agency compliance with the FOIA, OIP offers a number of training opportunities throughout the year for agency FOIA professionals and individuals with FOIA responsibilities.  These courses have been designed to offer training opportunities for personnel from all stages of the FOIA workforce, from new hires to the experienced FOIA professionals or FOIA managers. As Fiscal Year 2018 quickly approaches, we are pleased to announce the first set of training courses and dates through the first quarter of the next fiscal year.

OIP’s training courses and dates for the first quarter of FY 2018 are:

         Annual FOIA Report Refresher Training
         October 10, 2017

         Freedom of Information Act Litigation Seminar
         October 30, 2017

         Introduction to the Freedom of Information Act
         November 7, 2017

         Chief FOIA Officer Report Refresher Training
         December 11, 2017

All of these seminars will be held in Washington, D.C., and are open to all federal government employees.  Descriptions of each seminar as well as class sizes are available on the Training page of OIP's site.  As with last year, registration for courses will not open until two months prior to the date of the training.  Registration prior to that date will not be responded to or accepted. 

Read more here.

FOIA News: OGIS Visits USCIS

OGIS Visits U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS)

Nat'l Archives & Records Admin., The FOIA Ombudsman, Sept. 20, 2017

The United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) FOIA program in Lee’s Summit, Missouri invited several members of the OGIS staff to visit their facility this week to provide their FOIA staff with training and to facilitate an agency FOIA compliance assessment.

OGIS’s training sessions are intended to teach FOIA professionals practical communication skills to help them understand and resolve disputes. During the sessions, we also give training participants a chance to test drive their skills and fine-tune their approach through activities and a role-playing exercise. We provide this training twice each year at the National Archives, and also provide agency-centric training upon request. To learn more about our training program, or to find out more about setting up a session for your agency, please email us at ogis@nara.gov.

Read more here.

FOIA News: Watchdog demands cause for White House refusal to release Mar-a-Lago visitor logs

Watchdog demands cause for White House refusal to release Mar-a-Lago visitor logs

By Mallory Shelbourne, The Hill, Sept. 20, 2017

An ethics watchdog on Wednesday filed a motion requesting that a federal court compel the government to provide cause as to why it did not release the bulk of visitor logs from Mar-a-Lago.

The Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), along with the Knight First Amendment Institute and the National Security Archive, filed the motion after the Trump administration last week rebuffed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.

“[T]he government has repeatedly represented to the Court and to plaintiffs that the Secret Service was processing and would produce all non-exempt records for presidential visitors to Mar-a-Lago, a process it claimed would require months,” the motion said. 

Read more here.

FOIA News: Op-Ed Asks If the White House is Misleading Congress on FOIA

Is the White House misleading Congress over a contentious FOIA policy?

By Ryan Mulvey, The Hill, Sept. 20, 2017

The one thing that can be said with any certainty about the Trump administration’s position on transparency is that it is uncertain. Consider the president’s alleged directive to federal agencies that they ignore “oversight requests” from individual Democrat legislators, including ranking members on congressional committees. The directive, allegedly delivered by Uttam Dhillon, Special Assistant to the President, reportedly instructed agencies “not to cooperate” with requests except those from committee chairmen. 

News of the directive sparked outrage in Congress, yet the White House was initially reticent to provide any meaningful clarification. Bipartisan pushback only increased with the revelation of a May 1, 2017 Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) opinion letter, which seemingly corroborated press reports but presented a distorted view of the law. The White House disavowed the OLC opinion letter as a statement of government-wide policy, but a newly-disclosed document from the General Services Administration (GSA) now presents a potentially troubling contradiction to that claim. At worst, it suggests the White House misled Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) in an attempt to allay the senator’s concerns over the congressional inquiry policy.

Read more here.

FOIA News: NCPC finalizes revisions to FOIA regulation

The National Capital Planning Commission ("NCPC") published a final rule implementing revisions to the agency's FOIA regulations in today's issue of the Federal Register.  The rule, which is effective on October 20, 2017, follows the publication of proposed revisions on August 1, 2017.  NCPC received no public comment and made no changes to the proposed rule.  These changes are being implemented to comply with the FOIA Improvement Act of 2016.