The FBI and CIA: What’s a FOIA?

TND Guest Contributor: Tori Richards |

This may be Sunshine Week for anyone seeking transparency in government, but for the feds — especially the intelligence agencies — it’s anything but.

With a stroke of a pen, President Obama made it official that his office is exempt from information disclosure. And former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton probably won’t be disclosing work-related emails anytime soon.

While these issues made headlines, it’s the FBI and CIA that rank dead last in turning over information that the public has a right to know.

“The federal intelligence agencies are the very worst as far as trying to get information,” said a think-tank investigator who routinely submits Freedom of Information Act requests. “You rarely get what you ask for, and it takes years.”

The investigator asked not to be named because he wasn’t authorized to speak on the topic.

“The FOIA process is glacial and incredibly slow to begin with,” said Chris Farrell, director of investigations for the open-records advocacy group Judicial Watch. “There is a very heavy-handed use of the B-1 (classified) exemption where they claim something is classified. They use it in an overly broad way.”

Judicial Watch has filed hundreds of FOIA requests with the FBI and CIA over the years. It employs a team of lawyers and often has to sue to obtain information to which the public is legally entitled.

Farrell recalled submitting a request to the FBI to view its file on the late U.S. Sen. Ted Kennedy after he died. Individuals don’t have privacy rights after death, but if the FBI is the gatekeeper of information, this apparently doesn’t apply.

The agency eventually turned over 900 pages. Of that, 800 pages entailed death threats against the Kennedy family that were mostly “lunatic stuff,” Farrell said. The remaining pages were more interesting and contained things like Kennedy’s relationship with then-Soviet Secretary General Yuri Andropov and trips to Central and South America. Those 100 pages were heavily redacted.

Judicial Watch sued to obtain the information, a process that entailed numerous court dates. The FBI begrudgingly released information bit by bit.

“It had nothing to do with national security, it has to do with embarrassing the Kennedy family,” Farrell said.

For example, one of the redacted sentences read: “One counselor officer in Mexico opined that Teddy Kennedy was a spoiled brat.”

“They fought tooth and nail in front of a federal judge, lying about whether it was classified info or not,” Farrell said.

In the end, Judicial Watch prevailed over getting most of the information released, including the grand prize — anecdotes about Kennedy visiting a brothel in Peru with embassy staff.

Watchdog.org has been trying to get information from the FBI for a yet-to-be-released story since Oct. 17, 2013, when a detailed FOIA request was filed. On May 30, 2014, we received a letter:

“The FBI has located several thousands of pages of documents that are potentially responsive to your FOIA request. FBI staff members are scoping through this material for items responsive to your particular request. It is known that not all of this material pertains to your subject; based on our findings thus far, we estimate between 5500 and 6000 pages … actual disclosure processing will be completed in eleven months.”

Part of the information was released six months later but it was useless — thousands of entries on a spreadsheet containing only numbers.

If the FBI is a foot dragger, the CIA is worse. The agency rarely responds to requests after an initial acknowledgement that it received the FOIA, though the agency is required to respond within 20 days.

In one case, Judicial Watch claimed, the CIA lied about not having a file on Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born Muslim cleric and terrorist spiritual adviser. Judicial Watch requested his file after he was killed in a 2011 Yemen drone strike. The CIA said it had “absolutely no information,” Judicial Watch said.

However, court action by the American Civil Liberties Union yielded a Justice Department memo that showed the CIA ordered the drone strike and even set up al-Awlaki with a phony wife to keep tabs on his whereabouts.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Tori Richards has worked for CBS News, Bloomberg, Reuters. Agence-France Presse, the NY Post, the NY Times and The Daily among others. Her work has also appeared on CNN.com, FoxNews.com and US News & World Report.

Watchdog.org is an online news organization that publishes articles by independent journalists covering state-specific and local government activity. The program began in September 2009, a project of Franklin Center for Government & Public Integrity, a 501(c)3 non-profit organization dedicated to promoting new media journalism.  This article is reprinted with permission.

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