FOIA Advisor

Court opinions issued Mar. 20, 2020

Court Opinions (2015-2023)Allan BlutsteinComment

Reporters Comm. for Freedom of the Press v. DOJ (D.D.C) -- holding that: (1) plaintiffs’ claims were not barred by doctrines of issue preclusion or collateral estoppel because exemptions and/or documents at issue were new (2); FBI properly relied on Exemption 5 (deliberative process privilege), 7(C), and 7(E) to withhold records related to FBI’s impersonation of media.

Gellman v. DOJ (D.D.C.) -- in case involving records about plaintiff, concluding that: (1) Office of Information Policy properly withheld records as non-responsive, including portions of email chains; (2) Office of the Director of National Intelligence properly relied on Exemption 1 to withheld all but one category of records; (3) National Security Agency properly withheld records pursuant to Exemption 1 in conjunction with the National Security Act; (4) ODNI properly withheld the formatting, design, and organization of commercial entity’s new bulletins pursuant to Exemption 4; but that text of individual articles mentioning plaintiff’s name must be released; (5) DOJ properly relied on Exemption 5 (DPP) to withhold discussions about investigative techniques and how to respond to press inquiries, but it did provide adequate information for court to assess withholding of agency reactions to news articles; and (6) FBI properly wiitheld records pursuant to Exemption 7(A) and 7(E).

Petrucelli v. DOJ (D.D.C.) -- finding that: (1) Federal Bureau of Prisons conducted adequate search for records concerning plaintiff, a pro se prisoner, and that it properly withheld records pursuant to Exemptions 6 and 7(C); and (2) EOUSA did not sufficiently describe how it performed its search for records concerning plaintiff’s prosecution.

Summaries of all published opinions issued since April 2015 are available here.