NARA embroiled in politics surrounding documents re Supreme Court nominee Kavanaugh. The public loses.
I’ve been trying to get my head around the very public wrangling of the release of archival records relating to Judge Brett Kavanaugh. The National Archives (NARA) is in the process of releasing “Approximately 900,000 pages of email and paper records were requested by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Senator Charles Grassley.” But democratic Senators Diane […]
A day in the life of a govinfo librarian: FOIA’ing an old report
I thought I’d just share this here as no doubt other govinfo librarians have had similar experiences. When I say “day” it should really be “several months” because what started out as a simple ILL request grew into a several month email trail. A researcher asked the library to do an Interlibrary loan request for […]
The Pentagon’s $660 million FOIA fee
A friend reminded me today about this story from 2016 which was a Finalist for 2016 Golden Padlock award given each year by the group Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) “celebrating” the most secretive government agency or individual in the United States. that year, there were some real doozies. But I think the winner hands […]
U.S. Historians Are Fighting to Stop ICE From Erasing Records of Agency’s Treatment of Immigrants
[August 9, 2018 update] Thank you Meg Phillips, NARA’s External Affairs Liaison, for contacting me and offering additional information and context. Meg notes that “No agency may dispose of records without written authorization from the Archivist of the United States in the form of approval of the records retention schedule. That is what is going […]
Judge Lets Secret Service Hide White House Visitor Logs
The National Security Archive at George Washington University announced today that a federal judge is allowing the Secret Service to hide the White House visitor logs that contain 5.99 million records. Such records were routinely released by the Obama administration. When the Trump administration did not release its own records, NSA filed a FOIA lawsuit. […]