The Office of Government Information Services (OGIS) has delivered the Final Report and Recommendations of the 2018-2020 term of the FOIA Advisory Committee to the Archivist of the United States, David S. Ferriero. The report is the result of two years of hard work by the Committee’s 20 members, who include FOIA experts from inside and outside of government.
Read more here.
Media Outlets Accuse DOJ of Selectively Redacting Mueller Records
By Megan Mineiro, Courthouse News Serv., July 23, 2020
Attorneys for news outlets suing for records from the Mueller investigation accused the Justice Department on Thursday of applying redactions that back up President Donald Trump’s echoing claim of the probe being a “witch hunt.”
“It appears that this entire process of releasing information is an attempt to paint a one-sided picture of the entire special counsel investigation,” CNN attorney Charles D. Tobin said in a teleconference hearing.
U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton, without speaking to any possible validity in the claim, appeared doubtful that the arguments applied to the case before him regarding records from the FBI investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
Read more here.
'Circumstances have changed': DOJ ready for more Mueller report declassifications
By Jerry Dunleavy, Wash. Exam’r, July 21, 2020
More than a year after special counsel Robert Mueller’s report was released, the Justice Department has determined more of the redacted report can be declassified.
Civil division attorneys, including trial attorney Courtney Enlow, filed a four-page submission to a Washington, D.C., federal court on Tuesday, providing sealed responses to the judge’s questions about the redactions in Mueller's 448-page report and noting willingness to reveal more after a judge's ruling.
The response came after Judge Reggie Walton, a district court appointee of President George W. Bush who previously questioned Attorney General William Barr's "credibility" in the Freedom of Information Act case brought by the Electronic Privacy Information Center and BuzzFeed, provided the Justice Department a spreadsheet with questions about the redactions.
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Exhausting Effect Of FOIA Requests Evident In 'Baseless'
By Tin Mak, NPR, July 22, 20209:29 AM ET
Governmental secrecy not only permits evil, but also breeds it.
It's this concept that forms the backbone of Nicholson Baker's foray into the U.S. development of biological weapons in the 1950s. His book, Baseless: My Search For Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act has a promising concept, which is to use the topic as a way to examine the shortcomings of America's public records law.
The book does not deliver on that promise.
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Can the SBA Justify Its Decision to Release Only a Partial List of PPP Loan Recipients?
While the effort to foster transparency is laudable, the decision to limit disclosure to borrowers receiving loans over $150,000 leaves a large amount of information undisclosed. The public will remain in the dark as to three-quarters of the entities who received PPP loans.
By Matthew Collette, Nat’l Law Journal, July 20, 2020
Since the inception of the Payroll Protection Program to provide struggling businesses with loans under the CARES Act, the public and the media have been clamoring for information on who has received the loans. Controversies over a few acknowledged recipients, including Shake Shack and the Los Angeles Lakers, highlighted the lack of information about others. And in May, five prominent media outlets sued the Small Business Administration under the Freedom of Information Act for access to information about PPP loan recipients.
Read more here (accessible with free membership).
Sixty-two FOIA lawsuits were filed in June 2020 according to a report released by The FOIA Project on July 16. The report further indicates that 808 lawsuits have been filed over the past twelve months, which averages out to be 67 lawsuits per month.
Judge Blocks Further Inquiries in FOIA Case Questioning Hillary Clinton's Email Practices
"I find it hard from a practical perspective to believe that somehow [State Department officials] have not done their duty in trying to find records that relate to Secretary Clinton," U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton said at a recent hearing in the public records case.
By Mike Scarcella, Nat’l Law Journal, July 17, 2020
A federal judge in Washington on Friday refused to further prolong a public-records case that has raised questions about Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server during her service as U.S. secretary of state during the Obama administration.
Read more here (accessible with free subscription).
The Director of DOJ’s Office of Information Policy, Bobak Talebian, will deliver the keynote address at the American Society of Access Professional’s annual training conference on July 28, 2020. More details about the conference are available here.
FOIA Advisor’s own Allan Blutstein recently received his FOIA license plate in DC after originally being denied. Background on that denial here.
— FOIA Advisor (@AllanBlutstein) July 14, 2020
Judge Orders DOJ to Explain Its Secret Portions of the Mueller Report by Next Week
By Aaron Keller, Law & Crime, July 13, 3020
A federal judge on Monday granted a Justice Department request to delay providing detailed answers to questions about former Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s full, unredacted Russia report.
The judge, Reggie B. Walton, previously read the entire Mueller report and ordered the DOJ to answer a spreadsheet full of questions about the report’s publicly hidden contents. Responses are now due next Tuesday, July 21, one week after the previous deadline.
Read more here.