Power the Future v. White House Council on Envtl. Quality (D.D.C.) -- finding that plaintiff’s request for all emails sent or received by one employee over nearly three years was “unreasonably burdensome” (and therefore not reasonably described as required by FOIA ), because the agency estimated that processing the request “would require 21,870 hours, or 911 workdays, if all current FOIA Specialists employed by the Agency processed the request full-time”; further taking into account that the agency employee held a “high-level position” and his emails “would likely implicate numerous FOIA exemptions and require time-consuming internal review and consultation with the White House Counsel’s Office.”
Citizens for Responsibility & Ethics in Wash. v. DOJ (D.D.C.) -- concluding the agency’s use of Glomar and its categorical withholding of any responsive documents under Exemptions 6 and 7(C) was unjustified; explaining “DOJ’s Glomar response was not justified here for two reasons”: (1) the information at issue is already in the public domain, having been disclosed in other ligation through testimony, and (2) there is no evidence that confirming or denying the existence of responsive records would cause any harm to privacy interests; explaining further that the agency’s categorical withholdings were inappropriate because the privacy interests at stake are diminished and the agency has “underplay[ed] the relevant public interest.”
Rute v. DOJ (E.D. Tex.) -- ruling that: (1) plaintiff failed to administratively appeal denials from DOJ’s Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys and the Criminal Division, thus warranting dismissals of his claims against those agencies with prejudice; and (2) FBI properly refused to confirm or deny the existence of “public integrity investigations” against named third parties from Collin County, Texas; and (3) FBI failed to conduct adequate searches for records related to public integrity investigations against unnamed elected officials, attorneys, or law firms in Collins County, Texas, because the agency should have inputted the term “Collin County” into its Central Records System conjunction with the term “public integrity” to narrow the 800,000 results yielded by the latter term.
Summaries of all published opinions issued in 2025 are available here. Earlier opinions are available for 2024 and from 2015 to 2023.