FOIA Advisor

Court Opinions (2025)

Court opinions issued Jan. 10, 2025

Court Opinions (2025)Allan BlutsteinComment

Cincinnati Enquirer v. DOJ (S.D. Ohio) -- ruling that FBI properly relied on Exemption 7(C) in refusing to confirm or deny the existence of text messages between seven private individuals and a former Cincinnati councilwoman who pled guilty to honest services wire fraud; rejecting plaintiff’s argument that Ohio’s state privacy law limited privacy interests recognized under FOIA; also rejecting plaintiff’s public interest arguments because, among other things, they wrongfully presupposed the existence of records.

Pub. Health & Med. Professionals for Transparency v. FDA (N.D. Tex.) -- denying government’s motion to indefinitely suspend court’s order requiring production of certain COVID vaccine-related records (purportedly one-million pages) by June 30, 2025; rejecting FDA’s argument that the court committed “clear error” in setting schedule, because: (a) the original production schedule was entered three years ago, (b) FDA knew about the existence of the records at issue well before disclosing their existence to plaintiff or the court; and (c) the records were “undoubtedly responsive” to plaintiff’s 2021 request and should have been processed along with other records that were last produced in November 2023; further, rejecting FDA’s argument that a lower production rate—such as the 500-page monthly rate used in multiple cases in the DDC— was justified by “exceptional circumstances,” noting that FDA’s understaffing excuse was based on an astonishing claim that newly trained FOIA personnel needed two years to be fully trained; lastly, rejecting FDA”s assertion that the production schedule would be unduly burdensome, reasoning that plaintiff’s request is “arguably the most important FOIA request in American history” and that FDA has previously “risen to the challenge” to meet the court’s production orders.

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

Court opinions issued Jan. 8, 2025

Court Opinions (2025)Ryan MulveyComment

Wade v. Dep’t of Def. (D.D.C.) — dismissing pro se lawsuit, ostensibly brought under FOIA, for failing to “indicat[e] in the complaint or otherwise that [the plaintiff] had submitted FOIA requests to the relevant agency seeking the documents at issue.”

Gelb v. Dep’t of Def. (D.D.C.) — among other things, granting the government’s motion for summary judgment and ruling that (1) the requester could not bring FOIA claims against the Secretary of Defense and DOD’s Chief FOIA Officer in their individual capacities, and, more notably, (2) that the Defense Finance and Accounting Service was not obliged to “create a computer program that obtains and synthesizes information from multiple databases to create a record that does not otherwise exist,” namely, a “report of all stale-dated checks and EFT payments worth $100,000 or more, issued between 2017 and 2020, that remain uncashed,” as that would entail record creation, “which the FOIA does not require.”

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