Am. Ctr. for Law & Justice v. FBI (D.D.C.) -- concluding that plaintiff failed to show that the FBI had a policy or practice of not complying with plaintiff’s requests until plaintiff filed suit, because the three requests cited by plaintiff were “of strikingly different subject matter and scope” and FBI’s actions across the three requests were not uniform.
Powell v. IRS (D.D.C.) -- ruling that: (1) collateral estoppel or issue preclusion barred plaintiff from litigating certain records and that plaintiff failed to exhaust his administrative remedies with respect to several requests; and (2) IRS performed reasonable search for all but one remaining disputed record.
Shapiro v. DOJ (D.D.C.) -- in 107-page opinion addressing 83 requests submitted to FBI and ATF between 2005 and 2012, determining that: (1) plaintiff failed to demonstrate need for discovery; (2) FBI and ATF performed adequate search for records pertaining to animal rights activism; (3) based on sampling of disputed records, FBI properly withheld records pursuant to Exemptions 1, 3, 5, 7(A), 7(C), 7(D), and 7(E), but improperly relied on Exemption 4 in withholding two pages from a copyrighted book; (4) FBI’s processing error rate of 16 percent was not high enough to justify warrant complete reprocessing of withheld records; (5) ATF failed to demonstrate that it properly relied on Exemption 3 to withhold records submitted to a grand jury or that it properly withheld records pertaining to Macy’s department store pursuant to Exemption 4, but properly withheld records pursuant to Exemptions 5, 7(D), and 7(E).
Swick v. U.S. Dep’t of the Army (D.D.C.) -- deciding that Army did not perform adequate search for plaintiff’s psychological evaluation records or for electronic records associated with plaintiff’s employment file.
Summaries of all published opinions issued since April 2015 are available here.