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JustSecurity posts Trump Trials Clearinghouse
This is incredibly helpful! The Site JustSecurity, at the Reiss Center on Law and Security at New York University School of Law, has just created the Trump Trials Clearinghouse to track on the large number of criminal and civil cases in which the former president is a defendant. The site includes a calendar as well as court proceedings, key statutes, relevant government documents and correspondence, JustSecurity analysis and more for each pending case. The repository will continue to be updated as events occur.
JustSecurity is “an online forum for the rigorous analysis of security, democracy, foreign policy, and rights.”
Former President Donald Trump is a defendant in a sizable number of criminal and civil cases. To help readers parse through these complex legal developments, we have centralized information on Trump’s major cases in the most comprehensive clearinghouse of its kind. Below you will find links to relevant court proceedings, key statutes, government documents, and defense documents – as well as Just Security resources and analysis, media and other guides.
We will continue updating this page with new information as the trials develop. We hope this repository of information will be useful for analysts, researchers, investigators, journalists, educators, and the public at large.
If you think the Trump Trials Clearinghouse is missing something important, please send recommendations for additional content by email to lte@justsecurity.org.
Justice Dept annual FOIA summary report miscalculates FOIA release rate
Unredacted, the National Security Archive’s blog, analyzed the latest annual agency FOIA report from the Department of Justice’s Office of Information Policy (OIP), and found that the report over calculated and misrepresented the government’s release rate of FOIA requests. The FY2019 summary report said that agencies had achieved a government-wide release rate of 94.4% (up from 93.8% last year), but the Natl Security Archive’s analysis and math — when taking into account things like counting nearly entirely redacted documents as successful partial releases, and excluding more than 270,700 requests denied (often improperly) over fees, referrals, “no records” responses, and requests “improper for other reasons” — showed that a more accurate release rate calculated by the Archive and others “hovers between 50 and 60 percent.”
That’s not good. OIP and agencies across the federal government MUST do better, must conduct more efficient searches, must find more ways to proactively post documents online etc. The 2018-2020 FOIA Advisory Committee to the National Archives (of which I’m a member) has some very good recommendations in their draft report for making FOIA better. This is the peoples’ information. While there are legitimate reasons for limiting access to *some* information (see the 9 FOIA exemptions), agencies have to stop using bureaucratic impediments to block, deter, and obfuscate the public’s right to know what their government is doing in their name.
The FY2019 summary report argues that agencies have achieved a government-wide release rate of 94.4% (up from 93.8% last year). OIP calculates that overly-generous figure by counting nearly entirely redacted documents as successful partial releases (see above for an example), and excluding more than 270,700 requests denied (often improperly) over fees, referrals, “no records” responses, and requests “improper for other reasons.” A more accurate release rate calculated by the Archive and others hovers between 50 and 60 percent.
Other highlights from the report include:
- The government received 858,952 FOIA requests in FY 2019, down slightly from FY2018’s all-time high of 863,729 requests.
- Exemption 7(c) and 7(e) account for more than 50% of all exemptions applied to denied records or portions of records.
- Backlogged requests have decreased from 130,718 in FY2018 to 120,436 in FY2019.
- As a reminder, in 2008 President Obama instructed every agency to reduce its FOIA backlog by ten percent every year. As my dear former colleague Nate Jones notes in his article, FOIA: A Colossus Under Assault, only one agency did this – the Department of Health and Human Services.
- Four agencies account for 65% of all referrals (and associated delays): DOD, DOJ, DHS, and CIA.
- The appeals backlog continues to grow – up to 5,087.
- Don’t let this deter you from appealing, though, as agencies release improperly withheld information on appeal at least a third of the time.
- Agencies reported collecting $2,547,638 in FOIA fees – totaling less than .5% of total FOIA costs. These fees are not recouped by the agency, but are instead deposited in the Treasury Department’s general fund, making it all the more frustrating to see agency’s use “fee bullying” techniques to intimidate requesters into dropping or unnecessarily narrowing their requests.
- Agencies spent nearly $38,842,948 in FOIA litigation. Put another way, agencies lost 15x as much money fighting bad FOIA decisions in court as they collected in FOIA fees.
Reporting white collar prosecutions
According to DOJ, in 2018 it increased its number of white collar prosecutions.
“Also in FY 2018, the Justice Department increased white-collar prosecutions by more than three percent, charging more than 6,500 defendants.”
However TRAC reports a declining trend in corporate prosecutions.
TRAC
“Your source for comprehensive, independent and nonpartisan information about federal enforcement, staffing and spending.” https://trac.syr.edu/tracreports/ “TRAC offers free monthly reports on program categories such as white collar crime, immigration, drugs, weapons and terrorism and on selected government agencies such as the IRS, FBI, ATF and DHS. For the latest information on prosecutions and convictions, go to http://trac.syr.edu/tracreports/bulletins/. In addition, subscribers to the TRACFed data service can generate custom reports for a specific agency, judicial district, program category, lead charge or judge via the TRAC Data Interpreter.”
According to TRAC “The latest available case-by-case records from the Department of Justice (DOJ) show that the prosecution of white-collar offenders in January 2020 reached an all-time low since tracking began during the Reagan Administration. Only 359 defendants were prosecuted in January 2020. Almost all of these were individuals rather than businesses. January 2020’s prosecutions continued a downward slide, dropping 8 percent from a year ago, and were down 25 percent from just five years ago.”
co-published on govdoc-l and freegovinfo.info.
Appeals court rules DOJ must give sealed Mueller materials to Congress
Appeals court rules DOJ must give sealed Mueller materials to Congress By Harper Neidig – 03/10/20 12:27 PM EDT
“A federal appeals court in Washington ruled on Tuesday that the Department of Justice (DOJ) must hand over grand jury materials from former special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation to Congress.”
“A three-judge panel on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a federal judge’s decision that the House’s impeachment inquiry justified its request for the sealed documents.”
‘”In short, it is the district court, not the Executive or the Department, that controls access to the grand jury materials at issue here,” Judge Judith Rogers wrote in an opinion for the panel’s 2-1 majority. “The Department has objected to disclosure of the redacted grand jury materials, but the Department has no interest in objecting to the release of these materials outside of the general purposes and policies of grand jury secrecy, which as discussed, do not outweigh the Committee’s compelling need for disclosure.”‘
https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/486818-appeals-court-rules-doj-must-give-mueller-grand-jury-materials-to
The decision is at https://www.cadc.uscourts.gov/internet/opinions.nsf/E5DEA16F3BB4D8BD8525852700599D47/$file/19-5288-1832741.pdf
co-published on govdoc-l and freegovinfo.info.
Federal judge questions Barr’s credibility and orders review of Mueller report redactions
Federal judge questions Barr’s credibility and orders review of Mueller report redactions. By Amanda Robert, Legal Affairs Writer. MARCH 6, 2020, 10:30 AM CST https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/federal-judge-questions-barrs-credibility-and-orders-review-of-full-mueller-report
‘A federal judge said on Thursday he had “grave concerns about the objectivity” of Attorney General William Barr and his handling of the Muller report’s release last year. In his opinion, Judge Reggie Walton of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia said he would conduct his own independent review of the unredacted version of the report to assess if the Department of Justice properly withheld portions from the public under the Freedom of Information Act. “True to the oath that the undersigned took upon becoming a federal judge, and the need for the American public to have faith in the judicial process, considering the record in this case, the Court must conclude that the actions of Attorney General Barr and his representations about the Mueller Report preclude the Court’s acceptance of the validity of the Department’s redactions without its independent verification,” the judge wrote.’
Order:
ELECTRONIC PRIVACY INFORMATION ) CENTER, Plaintiff, v. UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE, Defendant. Civil Action No. 19-810 (RBW) and JASON LEOPOLD & BUZZFEED, INC., Plaintiffs, v. UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE, et al., Defendants. Civil Action No. 19-957 (RBW) http://cdn.cnn.com/cnn/2020/images/03/05/uenrosj.pdf
‘These circumstances generally, and Attorney General Barr’s lack of candor specifically, call into question Attorney General Barr’s credibility and in turn, the Department’s representation that “all of the information redacted from the version of the [Mueller] Report released by [ ] Attorney General [Barr]” is protected from disclosure by its claimed FOIA exemptions. Brinkmann Decl. ¶ 11 (emphasis added). In the Court’s view, Attorney General 20 Barr’s representation that the Mueller Report would be “subject only to those redactions required by law or by compelling law enforcement, national security, or personal privacy interests” cannot be credited without the Court’s independent verification in light of Attorney General Barr’s conduct and misleading public statements about the findings in the Mueller Report, id., Ex. 7 (April 18, 2019 Letter) at 3, and it would be disingenuous for the Court to conclude that the redactions of the Mueller Report pursuant to the FOIA are not tainted by Attorney General Barr’s actions and representations. And, despite the Department’s representation that it “review[ed] the full unredacted [Mueller] Report for disclosure pursuant to the FOIA,” Brinkmann Decl. ¶ 11, the Court cannot ignore that the Department’s withholdings under the FOIA exemptions mirror the redactions made pursuant to Attorney General Barr’s guidance, which cause the Court to question whether the redactions are self-serving and were made to support, or at the very least to not undermine, Attorney General Barr’s public statements and whether the Department engaged in post-hoc rationalization to justify Attorney General Barr’s positions.’ P19-20
co-published on govdoc-l and freegovinfo.info.
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