Att’y-Advisor, Nat’l Labor Relations Bd., GS 12, Wash. DC, closes 5/27/26 (public).
Gov’t Info Specialist, Dep’t of the Army, GG 12, Fort Meade, MD, closes 5/27.26 (non-public).
Sup. Att’y Advisor, Dep’t of Justice/EOIR, GS 15, Falls Church, VA, closes 6/2/26 (public).
Heritage Found. v. DOJ (D.D.C.) -- granting in part and denying in part former President Biden's motion to intervene in FOIA suit seeking Special Counsel recordings and transcripts of conversations between Biden and his ghostwriter/biographer, where DOJ abandoned its prior position opposing disclosure and left no party to adequately represent Biden’s privacy interests; granting intervention to oppose production of the materials to plaintiffs, but denying intervention as to cross-claims challenging a separate planned disclosure to the House Judiciary Committee on grounds that an intervenor may not inject issues not already before the court by another party.
Stevens v. HHS (N.D. Ill.) -- denying cross-motions for summary judgment on adequacy of search where HHS's declarations were insufficiently detailed to allow meaningful review of its searches for position announcements, work product, and travel records related to a former HHS employee now serving in Congress, and where CBP's search of tens of millions of documents had been narrowed to only 5,766 pages using a single search term without applying plaintiff's proposed narrowing parameters; ordering CBP to apply specified search terms to documents under 100 pages from 2019 only across multiple offices, while reserving for trial disputes over the adequacy of searches in various offices, CBP's withholdings, and whether the narrowed search would still be unduly burdensome.
Summaries of published opinions issued in 2026 are available here. Earlier opinions are available for 2025, 2024, and from 2015 to 2023.
A new study looks at how AI tools change the way people request public records. The researchers found that while AI helps write requests faster, it also creates major challenges for the agencies processing them. Read the seven-page paper here.
Att’y-Adviser, Nat’l Labor Relations Bd., GS 12, Wash., DC, closes 5/26/26 (public).
Mgmt. & Program Analyst, Dep’t of Transp./FAA, FG 13, Ft. Worth, TX, closes 6/9/26 (internal only).
[Bonus track from Frank Sinatra]
Mora v. U.S. Customs & Border Prot. (D.D.C.) -- granting defendants' motion for summary judgment and denying plaintiffs' motions for class certification and discovery in a case brought by immigration attorneys and individuals alleging that CBP maintained a policy or practice of failing to make timely FOIA responses; ruling that CBP's backlog resulted from "exceptional circumstances" rather than an unlawful policy of treating statutory deadlines as non-mandatory; rejecting plaintiffs' argument that the backlog surge between FY 2023 and FY 2024 demonstrated “mismanagement”; finding that agency declarations attesting to various remedial measures were entitled to a presumption of good faith that plaintiffs' “speculative” discovery requests failed to rebut; and declining to follow two decisions from the Northern District of California that applied the Ninth Circuit’s different policy-or-practice test.
Summaries of published opinions issued in 2026 are available here. Earlier opinions are available for 2025, 2024, and from 2015 to 2023.
Alper v. DOJ (D.D.C.) -- granting in part and denying in part plaintiff's renewed motion for summary judgment in a case where a death-penalty defense attorney sought FBI records relating to the murder conviction of a death-row inmate; ruling that the public interest in corroborating a death-row inmate's innocence claim outweighed the privacy interests of: (1) FBI agents who authored a 1997 memorandum concluding prosecution of Johnson was "highly unlikely" for lack of evidence; (2) private individuals named in documents related to a witness who pointed to an alternative suspect; and (3) hotel guests whose FBI witness statements corroborated Johnson's innocence where matching names to statements would advance the innocence claim; ordering disclosure of all three categories; and denying reconsideration of the court's prior Exemption 5 ruling protecting five FBI-DOJ attorney-client communications, but ordering the FBI to conduct a more detailed segregability review to determine whether any non-privileged strategic content was disclosable.
Summaries of published opinions issued in 2026 are available here. Earlier opinions are available for 2025, 2024, and from 2015 to 2023.
Media law attorney Frank LoMonte recently authored a law journal article suggesting that the government pay news outlets for turning government data into public accountability, the same way we pay solar producers for turning sunlight into electricity.
FOIA master Jason Leopold’s playbook: How persistence unlocks public records, Editors & Publishers, 5/14/26
Trump Admin Has Up to 120,000 Pages of Documents on Ghislaine Maxwell’s Prison Transfer: The bad news: It won’t tell us when our FOIA request for these records will be fulfilled, Mother Jones, 5/13/26.
To Redact, or not to Redact? A Local LLM Approach to Deliberative Process Privilege Classification, Cornell Univ., 5/11/26.
Dodging FOIA Could Now Mean Arrest and Strip Search, Depending on Who’s Asking, The Intercept, 5/9/2026.
Gov’t Info. Specialist, Dep’t of Def./Sec’y, GS 14, Alexandria, VA, closes 5/13/26 (non-public).
Gov’t Info. Specialist, Dep’t of the Air Force, Maxwell AFB, AL, closes 5/15/26 (non-public).
Sup. Att’y-Advisor, Dep’t of Justice/OIP, GS 15, Wash., DC, closes 5/24/26 (public).
Att’y Advisor, Dep’t of Justice/OPR, GS 14-15, Wash., DC, closes 6/2/26 (public).
Att’y-Advisor, Dep’t of Justice/OIP, GS 13-14, Wash., DC, closes 6/5/26 (public).
Federal jury convicts Alexandria man on charges relating to the deletion of U.S. Government databases
U.S. Attorney's Office, Eastern District of Virginia
May 7, 2026
A federal jury convicted Sohaib Akhter, 34, of Alexandria, today on charges of conspiracy to commit computer fraud, password trafficking, and possession of a firearm by a prohibited person.
According to court records and evidence presented at trial, Sohaib Akhter, and his twin brother and co-defendant, Muneeb Akhter, worked for a Washington, D.C., company that provided software products and services to more than 45 federal government agencies and hosted data for some federal government clients on servers in Ashburn. On Feb. 1, 2025, Muneeb Akhter asked Sohaib Akhter for the plaintext password of an individual who submitted a complaint to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s (EEOC) Public Portal, which was maintained by the Akhters’ employer. Sohaib Akhter conducted a database query on the EEOC database and then provided the password to Muneeb Akhter. That password was subsequently used to access that individual’s email account without authorization.
Read more here.