FOIA Advisor

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Court opinions issued July 12, 2019

Rocky Mounty Wild v. U.S. Forest Serv. (D. Colo.) -- ordering plaintiff to return, delete, or permanently destroy certain privileged records that agency inadvertently produced in response to FOIA request.

Prot. Our Defenders v. DOD (D. Conn.) -- finding that: (1) Air Force did not satisfactorily explain its searches for records concerning the agency’s “diversity team”; (2) Air Force properly withheld certain records pursuant to attorney-client and deliberative process privileges, except with respect to recommendations contained in “Talking Paper" on diversity efforts; (3) four DOD components and the Coast Guard improperly relied on Exemption 6 to withhold non-purely personal information from Staff Judge Advocate biographies; and (4) names of military personnel redacted from other requested records did not fall within Exemption 6 because the records did not constitute "personnel and medical files and similar files."

Bartko v. DOJ (D.D.C.) -- ruling that plaintiff was entitled to public interest fee waiver for request concerning his criminal case, because disclosure would “educate the public about a larger pattern of prosecutorial misconduct in the Eastern District of North Carolina.”

Summaries of all published opinions issued since April 2015 are available here.