Jim Snyder and Danielle Ivory of Bloomberg News examine how federal government agencies have failed to comply with requests to provide details and expenses of travel, going as far as to threaten reporters who have asked for the information.
Snyder and Ivory write, “One Bloomberg reporter filed a 2012 request for information on gifts to and from foreign dignitaries. Following up past deadline, a State Department FOIA officer told her to ‘Go ahead and sue’ — before hanging up the phone.
“A Bloomberg FOIA filing seeking details of conference-related spending at the U.S. Agency for International Development was met with a request for a copy of the reporter’s employment contract and copies of news articles written within the last three years. USAID backed off after being reminded that under the law, individuals have the legal right to request public information without regard to profession.
“On Sept. 26, 2007, another Bloomberg reporter requested a memo on the work contractors were doing in Iraq that had been prepared for then-Defense Secretary Gates. More than five years later — on New Year’s Eve, 2012 — the Pentagon denied the request. It cited an exception to FOIA allowing the withholding of communications between the president and his top advisers, one of nine categories of information shielded from the law.”
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