Court opinions
2025
Dates of decisions below. Please contact us if any of the links are broken. For additional sources of FOIA case law, see "Federal court cases" in Useful Links.
Jan. 24, 2025
Am. First Legal Found. v. USDA (D.C. Cir.) -- affirming district court’s decision that Exemption 5’s presidential communications privilege protected agency strategic plans to promote voter registration and voter participation that were submitted to the White House pursuant to an Executive Order; rejecting appellant’s argument that several agency declarations, the Executive Order, and a White House fact sheet undermined the White House’s sworn statements about the nature and use of the strategic plans.
Human Rights Def. Ctr v. U.S. Park Police (D.C. Cir.) -- (1) reversing district court’s decision that the names of police officers involved in three tort settlements were protected by Exemption 6 (and ordering their disclosure), because the agency’s showing was “wholly conclusory, lacking even minimal substantiation of the officers’ privacy interest or the potential harm from disclosing their names”; moreover, finding that the Park Police failed to meet the foreseeable harm test; and (2) vacating the district court’s order preventing plaintiff-appellant from disclosing, disseminating, or making use of the names of two settlement claimants inadvertently released; concluding that “neither FOIA nor any inherent judicial authority” enabled an agency to seek a court order to limit the effects of its error, and opining that a contrary Tenth Circuit decision neglected to properly consider “important limitations on courts’ inherent authority”; expressing no opinion as to whether a court may claw back inadvertently released documents that are “subject to any independent legal prohibition on disclosure such as applies to classified documents”, also declining to consider whether the First Amendment prevented the district court from issuing its clawback order.
Jan. 22, 2025
Sejas v. U.S. Attorney’s Office (S.D.N.Y.) -- granting government’s motion for summary judgment because pro se plaintiff, who sought records pertaining to three Bolivian individuals, neglected to administratively appeal agency’s denial pursuant to Exemptions 6 and 7(C).
Jan. 17, 2025
Helmer v. U.S. Dep’t of State (D.D.C.) -- determining that: (1) State Department performed adequate searches for various records concerning Sir Zelman Cowen, the nineteenth Governor-General of Australia; (2) plaintiff’s claim that State failed to timely respond to his request was moot; and (3) plaintiff lacked standing to bring a policy-or-practice claim because he never showed that he was realistically threatened by a repetition of State’s alleged policy of practice of unjustified delay.
Jan. 16, 2025
Stevens v. HHS (N.D. Ill.) -- ruling that:(1) U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement failed to show that it performed adequate search for various records concerning three individuals, reasoning that: (a) ICE neglected to explain the full scope of ICE program offices and why it limited its search to certain offices, (b) ICE did not sufficiently explain which of the potentially responsive records it found in each of the program offices for each of the individual requests were ultimately produced to plaintiff, and (c) ICE’s search terms were underinclusive for two of the requested individuals; and (2) agency failed to justify its withholdings, noting that its Vaughn Index was “at the very least incomplete” and its declaration contained “clearly erroneous statements showing a lack of attention to detail and accuracy”; further, remarking that ICE’s privacy-related redactions on a “publicly filed document readily available on a public docket” were “egregious,” “ludicrous” “preposterous,” and a “blatant misuse of exemptions” that “defies comprehension” and “screams of bad faith”; and (3) ICE must release all records to plaintiff in full, because: (a) in camera review would be too burdensome, (b) ICE already was already afforded an opportunity to file a supplemental Vaughn Index and “enough was enough” after years of delay.
Jan. 10, 2025
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.
Jan. 8, 2025
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.”
Jan. 3, 2025
Graybill v. NSA (C.D. Cal.) -- dismissing pro se lawsuit after finding that the NSA and CIA properly invoked Exemptions 1 and 3 to support their refusals to confirm or deny the existence of records concerning plaintiff.