FOIA News: State Dept. ordered to justify redacting 200 Clinton emails

State Dept. ordered to justify redacting 200 Clinton emails

By Katie Bo Williams, The Hill, July 14, 2016

The State Department will soon have to produce more information about Hillary Clinton's emails that it has chosen to redact or withhold entirely.

A federal judge on Thursday gave the agency until Oct. 28 to produce a document known as a “Vaughn Index” — used to justify a decision to withhold information requested under a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request — for 200 emails that passed through Clinton's private server.

The conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch, which has brought a bevy of FOIA lawsuits against the State Department regarding Clinton’s use of the unorthodox email setup when she was secretary of State, will get to choose which documents it wants the department to provide rational for.

Read more here.

FOIA News: Court concludes FOIA does not require release of booking photos

Court concludes FOIA does not require release of booking photos

By Jonathan H. Adler, Washington Post, July 14, 2016

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, sitting en banc in Detroit Free Press v. Department of Justice, has concluded that individuals have sufficient privacy interests in their police booking photos to preclude their release under the Freedom of Information Act. The decision, which produced an unusual lineup among the court’s justices, is available here.

Judge Cook wrote for the majority, joined by Chief Judge Cole and Judges Guy, Gibbons, Rogers, Sutton, McKeague, Kethledge and White. Her opinion begins:

In 1996, we held that the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), 5 U.S.C. § 552, required the release of booking photos of criminal defendants who have appeared in court during ongoing proceedings, finding that criminal defendants lack any privacy interest in the photos. Detroit Free Press, Inc. v. Dep’t of Justice (Free Press I), 73 F.3d 93 (6th Cir. 1996). Twenty years and two contrary circuit-level decisions later, we find Free Press I untenable. Individuals enjoy a non-trivial privacy interest in their booking photos. We therefore overrule Free Press I.

Read more here.

FOIA News: MuckRock is launching a national database of FOIA exemptions

MuckRock is launching a national database of FOIA exemptions

By Joseph Lichtman, NiemanLab, July 14, 2016

In the 2015 fiscal year, the U.S. federal government processed 769,903 Freedom of Information requests. The government fully fulfilled only 22.6 percent of those requests; 44.9 percent of federal FOIA requests were either partially or fully denied. Even though the government denied at least part of more than 345,000 requests, it only received 14,639 administrative appeals.

In an attempt to make the FOIA appeals process easier and help reporters and others understand how and why their requests are being denied, MuckRock is on Thursday launching a project to catalog and explain the exceptions both the federal and state governments are using to deny requests.
…
When a user files a request through MuckRock that gets rejected, the site will provide context on the rejection, explaining how the exemptions should be properly applied, how other users overcame similar rejections, and sample letters to submit for appeal. It’ll also highlight data on how often each exception is used and how often they’re successfully appealed.

Read more here.

FOIA News: DOJ announces first meeting of Chief FOIA Officers Council

INAUGURAL CHIEF FOIA OFFICERS COUNCIL MEETING

Office of Information Policy, FOIA Post, July 13, 2016

The inaugural meeting of the newly established Chief FOIA Officers Council will be held on July 22, 2016. President Obama recently signed into law the FOIA Improvement Act of 2016, which, among other things, established a Chief FOIA Officer Council. The Chief FOIA Officer Council is co-chaired by the Directors of OIP and OGIS and is made up of each agency Chief FOIA Officer and the Deputy Director of Management of OMB. In accordance with the new law, the Council is tasked with developing recommendations for improving FOIA, sharing best practices, and developing and coordinating initiatives.

The meeting will be held at 2:00pm on July 22, 2016 at the South Court Auditorium of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building; 1650 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20502. This meeting will be open to the public and live streamed. We will post a link to the live stream so that members of the public and interested agency personnel can view the meeting on July 22.   

A limited number of seats are available for members of the public to attend in person. For security purposes registration is required. Please email DOJ.OIP.FOIA@usdoj.govEmail links icon with the subject line “CFO Council Meeting – Public” by COB on July 18, 2016 to request a seat. On July 19, we will respond to your email to confirm your attendance and provide a link for you to formally register by July 21 at 12pm.  

Court opinions issued July 11, 2016

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.  

FOIA News: Recap of yesterday's Senate FOIA hearing

Culture of Secrecy in Federal Government Increasingly Undermines Freedom of Information Act

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.

FOIA News: Clinton opposes Judicial Watch's deposition request

Clinton legal team moves to block deposition in email lawsuit

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.

 

FOIA News: Senate Judiciary FOIA hearing tomorrow

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?"  

 

FOIA News: Judicial Watch Asks Federal Court for Additional Discovery: Seeks Testimony of Hillary Clinton

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.

FOIA News: Wall Street Journal Op-Ed on FOIA and Clinton's Private Server

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.