Court opinions issued May 26, 2026

Bal v. U.S. Dep't of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (2nd Cir.) (unpublished) -- affirming dismissal of FOIA claims against individual agency employees and dismissal of claim for damages; also affirming dismissal as moot of claim seeking to compel response to pending FOIA request where agency produced the requested records during litigation; and further affirming summary judgment for agency on redaction-related claims.

Res Ipsa Media, LLC v. DOJ (D. Md.) -- denying plaintiff's motion to compel Answer where DOJ filed motion to dismiss, or in in the alternative for summary judgment, arguing that a memo allegedly summarizing remarks by Chief Judge Boasberg at a Judicial Conference meeting was not an "agency record" subject to FOIA; declining to recharacterize DOJ's Rule 12(b)(1) motion as a Rule 56 motion solely to trigger answer deadline, finding DOJ's jurisdictional argument was not “patently frivolous.”

Summaries of published opinions issued in 2026 are available here. Earlier opinions are available for 2025, 2024, and from 2015 to 2023.

FOIA News: Biden sues DOJ to prevent release of his interviews

Why Biden Is Suing the DOJ—and What Trump Has Said About It

Tiago Ventura, TIME, May 27, 2026

ormer President Joe Biden is suing the Justice Department in an attempt to block the release of audio recordings and transcripts from private interviews with the ghostwriter of his 2017 memoir.

The lawsuit filed in Washington, D.C.'s federal court Tuesday argues that the DOJ is abandoning “core tenets of American justice” by disclosing what Biden’s legal team describes as the former President’s "private information."

According to the filing, the DOJ informed Biden that it plans to release the materials on June 15 to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee and right-wing think tank Heritage Foundation, which sued for access to the records under the Freedom of Information Act (FOAI) in 2024.

The foundation sought access to materials used in then-Special Counsel Robert Hur’s 2023 investigation into Biden’s handling of classified documents when he served as Vice President between 2009-2017.

Read more here.

FOIA News: It's the final countdown

Final FOIA Advisory Committee Meetings of the 2024-2026 Term

NARA/OGIS, FOIA Ombudsman, May 26, 2026

The final two meetings of the 2024-2026 term of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Advisory Committee are on Thursday, June 11, 2026, and Thursday, July 16, 2026, beginning at 10 a.m. ET. The purpose of the virtual meetings will be to hear reports from and discuss recommendations from each of the three subcommittees: Statutory Reform, Volume and Frequency, and Implementation, as well as vote on the final report and recommendations from the Committee. All meeting materials will be posted on the FOIA Advisory Committee website here (June meeting) and here (July meeting).

Read more here.

Jobs, jobs, jobs: The DMV hat trick

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).

Court opinions issued May 21, 2026

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.

FOIA News: Beach holiday reading

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.

Job, jobs, jobs: Come fly with me, let's fly away

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]

Court opinion issued May 18, 2026

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.

Court opinion issued May 14, 2026

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.

FOIA News: Pay for play

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.