Court opinion issued Dec. 9, 2019
Williams v. DOJ (D. Utah) -- concluding that: (1) Office of Professional Responsibility properly withheld in full certain documents concerning plaintiff’s whistleblower retaliation claim pursuant to deliberative process privilege, but other documents included segregable non-exempt information; (2) OPR properly relied on Exemption 6 to withhold the names of “unnoteworthy individual witnesses, low-level governmental employees, and other obscure individuals,” but improperly withheld in full all “outlines, notes, and transcripts related to those individuals”; (3) FBI properly relied on Exemptions 6 and 7(C) to withhold records about third parties who were subjects of criminal investigation and ultimately not prosecuted; (4) dismissing as moot plaintiff’s request for Criminal Division’s records about Thomas Pickard because plaintiff did not dispute adequacy of agency’s search, which yielded no records.
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