Campaign Legal Ctr. v. Dep’t of Justice (D.D.C.) — in a case concerning records about the addition of a “citizenship question” to the census, granting in part and denying in part the parties’ renewed cross-motions for summary judgment on remand; holding that a “10-page email thread between DOJ, Commerce, and White House staff” was properly withheld under Exemption 5 and the deliberative-process privilege, despite post-dating the decision to add the citizenship question to the census, because it was “‘not so much [intended] to explain the agency’s already-decided policy,’ but an ‘iterative weighing of legal and policy concerns’”; holding further that records reflecting discussions about a response to the Washington Post, draft correspondence with a Member of Congress, and inter-agency correspondence were all similarly protected by the deliberative-process privilege; declining, however, to accept the adequacy of the agency’s arguments for the privilege as applied to internal e-mail regarding the census and American Community Survey; noting the agency’s declarations do not “describe the withheld emails with sufficient particularity,” and “[a] one-paragraph explanation without detail, or the document itself [submitted for in camera review], is insufficient”; finally, holding that, while the agency could technically satisfy the requirements to withhold draft responses to interrogatories from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights under Exemption 5, it had failed to meet the foreseeable-harm standard by not connecting “two comments . . . about two lines of a 24-page” document to the asserted “broader harm of weakened inter agency relationships” or the internal “chill” of agency deliberations.
Webb v. Office of Mgmt. & Budget (D.D.C.) — in a case brought by a “highly vexatious [pro se] litigant,” granting, in relevant part, the government’s motion for summary judgment; holding that OMB conducted an adequate search, and rejecting the plaintiff’s arguments that the agency improperly “characterized his FOIA request as implicating classified records” and failed to locate “records indicating that COVID-19 originated in a laboratory”; noting the plaintiff’s “unsubstantiated assertion that there must be records indicating that COVID-19 originated in a laboratory is the kind of ‘purely speculative claim[] about the existence and discoverability of other documents’ that cannot rebut the presumption of good faith accorded to detailed agency affidavits describing a search.”
Soliman v. Threat Screening Ctr. (D.D.C.) — granting the agency’s motion for summary judgment; holding that the Threat Screening Center (formerly, the Terrorist Screening Center) is a subcomponent of the FBI’s National Security Branch, rather than its own “agency,” and therefore the plaintiff failed to exhaust administrative remedies by filing an appeal challenging the adequacy of the agency’s search for responsive records; notably, the FBI did not raise any specific exhaustion argument in its motion for summary judgement, but only as a defense in its answer.
Aviation Servs. LLC, et al. v. Small Bus. Admin.; Russo, et al. v. Small Bus. Admin. (N.D. Cal.) — in a pair of consolidated cases concerning the SBA’s Economic Injury Disaster Loan (“EIDL”) program, granting in part and denying in part the parties’ cross-motions for summary judgment; holding, firstly, that the agency’s failure to provide timely determinations did not, in and of itself, provide grounds for any declaratory or injunctive relief, particularly since the plaintiffs failed to plead any “policy or practice” claim; also holding that the agency, in large part, conducted an adequate search, but reserving judgment as to certain aspects of the reasonableness of the search methodology due to deficient supporting declarations; directing the agency to provide more detail about certain search terms and to run some supplemental searches; concluding the agency properly withheld case file notes under Exemption 5, in conjunction with the deliberative-process privilege, and that it properly withheld the bank account numbers of individual EIDL applicants under Exemption 6; yet also ruling the agency could not use Exemption 6 to withhold either the names and addresses of loan program participants, or the bank account numbers of “non-personal entities,” i.e., any “company or business entity”; rejecting the agency’s categorical use of Exemption 6 to withhold third-party EIDL application information, including aggregate statistical data, because the agency had not made the necessary showing that “all responsive information” refers to “individually-owned or closely-held businesses” or would otherwise be personally identifying; concluding the agency correctly used Exemption 4 to withhold a company’s “confidential unit pricing”; finally, rejecting the requesters’ “reading-room” claims for failure to meet the “threshold” requirement of describing what records have not been made available under 552(a)(2)(B)-(C) in the agency’s FOIA library.
Jewish Legal News, Inc. v. Dep’t of Educ. (N.D. Cal.) — granting in part and denying in part the parties’ cross-motions for summary judgment; holding the requester lacked standing to challenge “certain redactions and withholdings in the FOIA response that were originally made in response to previous FOIA requests” and only “[re-]produced here in response” to an item of the request at issue; holding also that the agency properly applied Exemption 5 and the deliberative-process privilege, except with respect to emails that reflect communications with persons using “accounts outside the government”; rejecting the agency’s contention that such non-government accounts may have been White House employees as unsupported by adequate specificity in its Vaughn index; concluding the agency properly applied Exemptions 6 and 7(A); rejecting the plaintiff’s policy-and-practice claim predicated on the agency having taken “several months to process and produce documents on a rolling bases,” and explaining that productions are distinct from a “determination,” which is what must be provided within a specified timeframe; denying without prejudice the requester’s motion to the extent it alleged a failure to conduct an adequate search or to reasonably segregate non-exempt material from the records at issue.
Summaries of all published opinions issued in 2025 are available here. Earlier opinions are available for 2024 and from 2015 to 2023.
