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An Associated Press analysis of new U.S. data finds the Obama administration in its final year spent a record $36.2 million on legal costs defending its refusal to turn over federal records under the Freedom of Information Act. The Obama administration also set a record -- for a second consecutive year -- for times federal employees told citizens, journalists and others that despite searching they couldn't find a single page of files that were requested.

The IRS has told a federal court that they've recently identified almost 7,000 more documents that could contain information on how the agency targeted the tax-exempt applications of Tea Party organizations or other conservative political groups starting back in 2010, according to a court document. But IRS in the document would not commit to a timeline for releasing the documents. The revelation of thousands of unreleased documents was made in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit from Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group that specializes in filing, and in many instances litigating, FOIA requests. For Judicial Watch President...

California Supreme Court Says Emails And Texts on Officials' Private Accounts Are Public RecordsGovernment employees in California cannot keep the public from seeing their work-related emails and texts sent on personal devices and through private accounts, the state's Supreme Court ruled unanimously Thursday, closing a loophole that justices said could have allowed the "most sensitive and potentially damning" communications to be shielded. With the ruling, California joins a growing list of states that treat public business done through private accounts as public records. "This ruling is a model for giving government transparency laws meaning in the digital age," said Matthew...

Lawmakers in California have filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to look into the activities of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in the state, the Huffington Post reported Friday. According to the report, the request was filed in order to retrieve “information about recent Department of Homeland Security policies and Immigration and Customs Enforcement activities.” The measure was filed by two Democratic lawmakers, Senate President Pro Tem Kevin De Leon and California Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon, who argue that transparency is crucial to many California residents. “When the safety of Californians is at stake, we must demand greater...

Top lawyers who helped the Obama White House craft and hold to rules of conduct believe President Donald Trump and his staff will break ethics norms meant to guard against politicization of the government — and they’ve formed a new group to prepare, and fight. United to Protect Democracy, which draws its name from a line in President Barack Obama’s farewell address that urged his supporters to pick up where he was leaving off, has already raised a $1.5 million operating budget, hired five staffers and has plans to double that in the coming months. They’ve incorporated as both a...

Conservative foundation Judicial Watch is planning to sue several government agencies if they do not hand over records related to the wiretapping of former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. The group filed Freedom of Information Act requests for the records weeks ago but are planning to sue by next week for the records if they do not receive anything by then. Judicial Watch filed the requests with the FBI, NSA, CIA, and Treasury Department, according to the group’s Director of Investigations and Research Chris Farrell. The group is aiming to find out whether there was ever a warrant allowing the...

Perhaps the subject of the terror attack on the US consulate in Benghazi will become more academic than political after the 2016 election denied Hillary Clinton the presidency. For now, though, documents continue to emerge that contradict the narrative created by Hillary and the Barack Obama White House about the nature of the attack. Yesterday, Judicial Watch received 54 more pages from its FOIA lawsuits and came across a bombshell buried in them. Notes of a State Department briefing for Congressional aides on the day after the attack show Undersecretary Patrick Kennedy acknowledging that the attack was not a...

The University of Michigan has not delivered documents requested from it in a Freedom of Information Act request despite depositing a check over a month ago. On Nov. 16, 2016, the Mackinac Center for Public Policy filed a FOIA request to the university regarding certain emails of U-M President Mark Schlissel. The university’s FOIA office received the request the next day, then on Nov. 28 requested a 10-day extension allowed under state law. On Dec. 12, the university said a full response to the FOIA request would cost $126 for 2.75 hours of labor. The Mackinac Center paid the university...

Judicial Watch today announced a hearing will be held Tuesday, February 7, 2017, regarding Judicial Watch’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit seeking records held by the FBI containing text messages and emails of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stored on the equipment of Datto Inc., a commercial data management company, as well as FBI records about the device and what materials were recovered on it (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of Justice (No. 1:16-cv-02369)).  The case is before U.S. District Court Judge Randolph D. Moss.At the previous hearing Tuesday, January 24, 2017, Trump administration lawyers for the FBI...

Since 2009, press access to the White House has been notably restricted, whistleblower prosecutions have spiked, and Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuits against the federal government have reached an all-time high. In 2013, the Committee to Protect Journalists published a scathing report, written by former Washington Post editor Leonard Downie Jr., on the Obama administration's obsession with controlling media coverage and burnishing its image.... The most immediate change was a sudden clampdown on unauthorized comments and interviews. The Obama administration made sure the word got out: The only people who talk to journalists are public affairs officers. In 2014,...

Welcome to the Central Intelligence Agency's Freedom of Information Act Electronic Reading Room. Do UFOs fascinate you? Are you a history buff who wants to learn more about the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam or the A-12 Oxcart? Have stories about spies always fascinated you? You can find information about all of these topics and more in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Electronic Reading Room. Link goes to reading room.

Full title: Judicial Watch: U.S. Customs, Homeland Security Records Reveal Somalis Given Security Briefings, ‘Community Engagement Tours’ in Secured Areas at Major U.S. Airports Somalis Given Access to Sensitive Information (Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch today released 31 pages of records from U.S. Customs and Border Protection revealing that the Department of Homeland Security has given Somalis “community engagement tours,” including security briefings, in secured areas at least three major U.S. airports – Los Angeles, Minneapolis, and Columbus, Ohio. The records came in response to a May 2016 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, which sought records, documents and communications...

Documents release at link.

How our government is supposed to work is well-documented in the Constitution and in countless laws, judicial rulings, and civil traditions handed down to us since the United States was founded. Now while theory is fine, a more critical need of citizens is to know how our government actually works in the real world. To discover that, officials, reporters, and citizens simply must have free access to documents, media, and internal records of their government. This transparency or openness is key to running any free republic that’s truly accountable and responsive to the citizens who rule that republic. The...

Faced with a public records request from Mississippi Today for the state's contract with EdBuild, a legislative committee voted Tuesday to adopt a new policy mandating that all contracts it approves be confidential. The House Management Committee, which approves contracts entered into by the House of Representatives, voted 7-3 to pass the policy, which states "All contracts entered into by the House Management Committee shall be confidential and shall not be released to any person or entity, except as specifically directed by the House Management Committee only when the committee deems necessary for the execution of the contract." The action...

A federal judge said Monday that emails relating to Hillary Clinton's time as secretary of state that were found during an FBI investigation of former Rep. Anthony Weiner could be subject to public disclosure as part of a pending lawsuit. U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, presiding over a hearing one day before the presidential election between Clinton and Republican Donald Trump, scheduled a Nov. 29 hearing to discuss whether the FBI had provided the records to the State Department. FBI Director James Comey shook the presidential race on Oct. 28 when he informed Congress that agents had recovered the emails,...

Judicial Watch today released 296 pages of State Department records. They include 44 email exchanges that were not previously turned over to the State Department, notwithstanding Hillary Clinton’s claim that as far as she knew, all of her government emails were turned over. The emails, in the words of Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton, “show the Clinton Foundation, Clinton donors, and operatives worked with Hillary Clinton [while she was Secretary of State] in potential violation of the law.” No wonder Clinton and Huma Abedin hid emails from the American people, the courts, and Congress. In one exchange, from April 2009,...

On document 3 of 4, take a look at this: Pg. 68: Medical diagram of the entry and exit wound of the gunshot Pg. 135: "I then spoke with an unidentified male who stated the following: That the Whitewater case, which was being investigated in Washington and an individual involved in this, identified as Vince Foster, who had reportedly committed suicide was not, in fact, a suicide but a murder victim. He indicated that there was a van involved, no color given, with the first three numbers of the tag being '227'".https://vault.fbi.gov/vincent-foster/vincent-foster-part-01-of-04/view  

Only days before the presidential election, the FBI released a 17-year-old archive of documents from a long-closed investigation into Bill Clinton's presidential pardon of a fugitive financier, prompting questions from Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign about its timing. The release comes amid the bureau's controversially timed review of emails from a Hillary Clinton aide. The 129 pages of heavily censored material were published Monday on the FBI's Freedom of Information Act webpage and noted by one of the bureau's Twitter accounts Tuesday. Earlier in October, the FBI unit published historical files as far back as 1966 about Donald Trump's father, Fred...

The clerk of Lincoln Township, Michigan — a small township near the tip of the Thumb — publicly criticized a citizen for filing a Freedom of Information Act request. The Huron Daily Tribune reports: Clerk Irvin Kanaski also called upon township residents at Monday night’s meeting to chide Arlene Schipinski for seeking the information surrounding a $1,100 private donation to the township’s legal fund. Kanaski said Schipinski’s requests cost the township $2,300 to $2,500 in legal fees, not counting the time he and Treasurer Patricia Weber put into handling the request. “This cost is more than double that of the...