People for the Ethical Treatment Animals v. HHS (D.C. Cir.) -- affirming district court's decision that HHS properly relied on Exemption 4 to withhold records about importation of nonhuman primates, specifically shipment-by-shipment quantity, crate size, and airline carrier information.
Summaries of all published opinions issued since April 2015 are available here.
The Department of Defense will withdraw the Inspector General's FOIA regulations effective August 20, 2018, according to a notice published in the Federal Register. On February 6, 2018, DoD implemented a single departmental-wide regulation that eliminated the need for component-specific FOIA rules.
Judge: Trump's release of dossier memos opens door to disclosures from FBI
Josh Gerstein, Politico, Aug. 16, 2018
President Donald Trump’s decision to declassify competing congressional memos about the validity of the so-called Steele dossier means the FBI has lost its authority to rebuff Freedom of Information Act requests about the bureau’s efforts to verify the report’s intelligence linking Trump to Russia during the 2016 campaign, a federal judge ruled on Thursday.
U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta previously blessed the FBI’s decision to refuse such FOIA requests by declining to confirm whether any records exist about aspects of its handling of the hotly contested dossier, prepared by the former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele. The judge ruled in January that Trump’s tweets about the dossier did not require the FBI and other intelligence agencies to be more responsive to public records requests on the issue.
However, Mehta said Trump’s actions in February to greenlight the release of one memo from House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) and a separate memo from the panel’s ranking Democrat, Rep. Adam Schiff of California, left untenable the FBI’s position of resisting disclosure.
Read more here.
By Jordain Carney, The Hill, Aug. 16, 2018
Senate Democrats warned on Thursday that they will sue the National Archives for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s records if their Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) request fails.
Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Democrats will file a lawsuit to try to get documents, including from Kavanaugh’s time as a staff secretary to President George W. Bush, if they run into roadblocks on the FOIA.
Read more here.
Elec. Privacy Info. Ctr. v. DOJ (D.D.C.) -- ruling that DOJ properly relied on Exemption 5 (deliberative process and presidential communications privileges) and Exemption 6 to withhold various records pertaining to "evidence-based assessment tools that seek to predict the statistical probability of an individual’s recidivism."
Summaries of all published opinions issued since April 2015 available here.
Djenasevic v. EOUSA (D.D.C.) -- determining that: (1) Executive Office for United State Attorneys and Drug Enforcement Administration performed reasonable searches for records concerning plaintiff, a convicted heroin dealer; (2) EOUSA properly withheld records pursuant to Exemption 3 (grand jury), 5 (deliberative process privilege), 6, and 7(C); (3) DEA properly withheld records pursuant to Exemption 7(D), 7(E), and 7(F).
Summaries of all published opinions issued since April 2015 available here.
KPIX 5, Aug. 14, 2018
San Francisco Ethics Commission vice chair Quentin Kopp has filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Secret Service for their failure to comply to a Freedom of Information Act request regarding Donald Trump Jr.’s trip to India in February, according to a news release.
Kopp, a former state senator and superior court judge, planned a news conference Tuesday morning on the steps of the federal courthouse in San Francisco announcing the suit.
Read more here.
Government 'transparency' has gone too far
Mitch Daniel, Wash. Post, Aug. 13, 2018
Dave Eggers’s 2013 novel “The Circle” depicts a world where demands for “openness” annihilate privacy and personal autonomy, creating a dystopian nightmare. Public officials in the tale try to outdo each other in going “clear” by wearing body cameras and microphones every waking moment. For most readers, the book is farfetched science fiction, but for those active in public life, Eggers’s conception doesn’t seem all that implausible.
It’s hard to determine when too much of a good thing becomes truly too much. And the more laudable the goal, the harder it generally is to reel in the excess, because any suggested retrenchment is viewed as an abandonment of the goal itself. At the risk of being misconstrued, I venture the heretical thought that we have overshot in the pursuit of governmental “openness” and “transparency.”
There’s no question that American government at all levels is better off for the open-door and open-record reforms of the past half-century. Knowing that the public is watching, public officials generally behave more responsibly in the conduct of their duties.
Read more here.
[ALB comment: The email ship sailed away at least 25 years go.]
As of today, there are only thirty-three (33) business days left in fiscal year 2018, which concludes on September 30, 2018. Many federal agencies will soon shift their focus from processing incoming requests to pending requests only in order to reduce their backlogs. If an agency receives any request on or after August 16, 2018, that triggers a 10-business-day extension (that is, for "unusual circumstances"), that request will not be deemed backlogged until fiscal year 2019. Simpler requests that are submitted on or after August 30, 2018, also will not be considered backlogged until fiscal year 2019.
The National Archives and Records Administration published a notice in today's issue of the Federal Register announcing the first meeting of the new FOIA advisory committee term on September 6, 2018, from 10:00am to 1:00pm. The meeting will involve the introduction of new members, a review of upcoming meetings, and brainstorming of topics for the subcommittees.
The public is welcome to attend, but must register before 5:00pm on September 4, 2018. Further details are available here.