Leopold v. Nat'l Sec. Agency (D.D.C.) -- ordering DOJ's Office of Legal Counsel to employ a Clearwell eDiscovery tool to search the email files of departed OLC attorneys for any records related to surveillance of federal and state judges.
Offor v. EEOC (E.D.N.Y.) -- dismissing case as moot because plaintiff received her case file with only modest redactions to three of the 265 pages, which she did not contest.
Summaries of all opinions issued since April 2015 available here.
By Jack Bouboushian, Courthouse News Service, July 13, 2016
President Barack Obama recently signed a law to improve the Freedom of Information Act, but the Senate Judiciary Committee heard Tuesday that the all-time low for unfulfilled requests occurred just last year.
The committee chaired by Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, convened this morning to look at FOIA 50 years after its adoption by President Lyndon Johnson.
"Over time, the government has found waits of undermining FOIA," Grassley said. "We still find a culture of secrecy, in both Democratic and Republican administrations. The Obama administration set a new record in 2015 for failing to fulfill FOIA requests. And several of his top officials used personal email accounts to avoid having their communications on the public record."
Grassley's thinly veiled dig at former secretary of state Hillary Clinton came as the presumptive Democratic nominee for president rallied in New Hampshire with Sen. Bernie Sanders.
Republicans have been abuzz for the last week after the FBI recommended no charges against Clinton for her careless handling of classified State Department emails.
Though FBI Director James Comey saw no criminal intent, the State Department is conducting its own probe of the controversy.
Rick Blum, director of the Sunshine Institute, testified before the committee about the unacceptable length of time it takes for FOIA requestors to get a reply.
"Journalists who use FOIA have to anticipate doing something with the requested information months or even years down the line," Blum said.
Read more here.
By Josh Gerstein, Politico, July 12, 2016
Lawyers for Hillary Clinton are going to federal court for the first time to block efforts to force her to testify in a civil lawsuit related to her private email set-up.
Clinton's attorneys submitted a legal filing Tuesday morning in a bid to shut down a conservative group's request for an order forcing her to submit to a deposition in the midst of her presidential campaign.
Clinton’s legal team said her testimony was unnecessary and superfluous in light of her questioning before the House Benghazi Committee last October and several State Department inquiries into the issue.
Read more here.
The Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing tomorrow at 10:00 AM to discuss "FOIA at Fifty: Has the Sunshine Law's Promise Been Fulfilled?"
Judicial Watch Asks Federal Court for Additional Discovery: Seeks Testimony of Hillary Clinton
July 8, 2016
***Immediately after filing this request for further discovery, the court ordered Clinton, Finney and Bentel to respond by Tuesday, July 12 and for Judicial Watch to reply by Thursday July 14. A hearing is set for Monday, July 18, 2016.
Judicial Watch announced today that it submitted a request for permission to depose former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton; the Director of Office of Correspondence and Records of the Executive Secretariat (“S/ES-CRM”) Clarence Finney; and the former Director of Information Resource Management of the Executive Secretariat (“S/ES-IRM”) John Bentel. Today’s request arises in a Judicial Watch Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit before U.S. District Court Judge Emmet G. Sullivan that seeks records about the controversial employment status of Huma Abedin, former Deputy Chief of Staff to Clinton. The lawsuit was reopened because of revelations about the clintonemail.com system. (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:13-cv-01363)).
Read more here.
Clinton’s Information Lockdown
By L. Gordon Crovitz, Wall Street Journal, July 11, 2016
Lyndon Johnson did his best to block the Freedom of Information Act, but public opinion forced him to make government records available. The question now is how FOIA, which LBJ signed 50 years ago this month, survives the precedent Hillary Clinton set with her basement server intended to keep her emails hidden from public view.
Bill Moyers, LBJ’s press secretary at the time, recalled in a 2003 broadcast how FOIA nearly didn’t become law: The president “hated the very idea of a Freedom of Information Act, hated the idea of journalists rummaging in government closets, hated them challenging the official view of reality.”
LBJ relented and signed what he called “the damned thing” on July 4, 1966, but insisted on no fanfare. In the decades that followed, FOIA became an essential tool for government accountability.
No public official since LBJ has gone as far as Hillary Clinton to evade public-disclosure laws. In 2010 her adviser Huma Abedin recommended that she use a government email account, as the State Department required. “I don’t want any risk of the personal being accessible,” Mrs. Clinton responded in an email that has since come to light. She used a private email server for all her communications because this kept both official and personal communications off government servers, where they would have been subject to disclosure under FOIA.
ead more here.
July 7, 2016
Shah v. U.S. Dep't of Justice (E.D. Ark.) -- finding that plaintiff failed to file administrative appeals in connection with three of his five requests to the Federal Bureau of Prisons and that the agency properly withheld certain information under Exemptions 6, 7(C), and 7(F).
Atlasware, LLC v. Soc. Sec. Admin. (W.D. Ark.) -- dismissing lawsuit because plaintiff's attorney failed to identify his client in the request or administrative appeal. In dicta, the court rejected plaintiff's argument that agency's cloud computing made venue proper under 5 U.S.C. § 552(a)(4)(B).
July 6, 2016
Freedom Watch, Inc. v. Nat'l Sec. Agency (D.D.C.) -- determining that the CIA and Department of Defense conducted adequate searches regarding a military helicopter shot down in Afghanistan, that they properly withheld certain information pursuant to Exemptions 1, 3, 5, and 6, and that they released all non-exempt, reasonably segregable information.
Summaries of all opinions issued since April 2015 available here.
By Mike Chesnick, Futurity, July 8, 2016
Congress passed the Freedom of Information Act in 1966 so that citizens could have more access to public records and hold government accountable. Since then, less information has become available to the public about businesses, researchers report.
Jeannine Relly and Carol Schwalbe, both associate professors in the University of Arizona School of Journalism, analyzed 60 years of congressional testimony, finding that corporations lobbied to alter the scope of the FOIA.
“Though the FOIA is known as embodying the ‘people’s right to know,’ our research found that exceptions and exemptions to the law over time often favored the industries that lobbied heavily for information to be withheld,” Relly says.
Schwalbe says not receiving vital information through the press “reduces what the public learns about dangers to our health and safety, such as defective tires, bogus insurance policies, hazardous waste, and nuclear radiation.”
The researchers detail their findings in the journal Government Information Quarterly.
Read more here.
Records request flood in about Clinton, Lynch meeting
By Sarah Westwood, Washington Examiner, July 8, 2016
Amid a fierce backlash over the Justice Department's decision to close its investigation of Hillary Clinton this week without pressing charges, law enforcement officials must now face Freedom of Information Act requests seeking details of the controversial meeting between Attorney General Loretta Lynch and former President Bill Clinton.
America Rising, a Republican political action committee, submitted 20 FOIA requests to the Justice Department and state attorney general offices seeking discussions about the secret meeting, which came just one week before FBI Director James Comey announced he would not recommend an indictment for the former secretary of state.
The request to the Justice Department sought emails and text messages related to Lynch's meeting with Bill Clinton, as well as a copy of her official work calendar for June 27, the day of her brush with the former president.
Read more here.
Deleted Clinton emails now likely subject to open records requests
By Sarah Westwood, Washington Examiner, July 7, 2016
While the case was unrelated to the Clinton email controversy, it could open the door for media outlets and watchdog groups to obtain the official emails that FBI agents recovered from Clinton's private servers.
Mark Zaid, a national security lawyer who regularly handles FOIA cases, said the Justice Department has likely lost its ability to hide behind exemptions in the open records law that protect documents related to an ongoing investigation from disclosure.
"They're in the possession of the FBI, so they're agency records as far as I'm concerned and should be subject to FOIA, especially because a number of those were work emails that were deleted by the lawyers," Zaid said.
He said Clinton's legal team "failed" in their duty to provide the government with all of the former secretary of state's official communication, although he stopped short of attributing those omissions to "malicious thought."
Read more here.