Star

Mainland 14 Monday, March 21, 2016
The San Juan Daily Star
US Gov’t Sets Record for Failures
to Find Files When Asked
When it comes to providing government
records the public is asking to see, the
Obama administration is having a hard
time finding them.
In the final figures released during President Barack
Obama’s presidency, the U.S. government set a
record last year for the number of times federal employees
told disappointed citizens, journalists and
others that despite searching they couldn’t find a
single page of files requested under the Freedom of
Information Act. In more than one in six cases, or
129,825 times, government searchers said they came
up empty-handed, according to a new Associated
Press analysis.
The FBI couldn’t find any records in 39 percent of
cases, or 5,168 times. The Environmental Protection
Agency regional office that oversees New York and
New Jersey couldn’t find anything 58 percent of the
time. U.S. Customs and Border Protection couldn’t
find anything in 34 percent of cases.
“It’s incredibly unfortunate when someone waits
months, or perhaps years, to get a response to their
request — only to be told that the agency can’t find
anything,” said Adam Marshall, an attorney with
the Washington-based Reporters Committee for
Freedom of the Press.
A Justice Department spokeswoman, Beverly
Lumpkin, said the administration answered more
records requests and reduced its backlog of leftover
requests, which should be considered good work on
the part of the government in fulfilling information
requests.
The AP’s annual review covered all requests to
100 federal agencies during fiscal 2015. The administration
released its figures days ahead of Sunshine
Week, when news organizations promote open government
and freedom of information.
It was impossible to know whether more requests
last year involved non-existent files or whether federal
workers were searching less than diligently before
giving up to consider a case closed. The administration
said it completed a record 769,903 requests,
a 19 percent increase over the previous year despite
hiring only 283 new full-time workers on the issue,
or about 7 percent. The number of times the government
said it couldn’t find records increased 35 percent
over the same period.
“It seems like they’re doing the minimal amount
of work they need to do,” said Jason Leopold, an investigative
reporter at Vice News and a leading expert
on the records law. “I just don’t believe them. I
really question the integrity of their search.”
In some high-profile instances, usually after news
organizations filed expensive federal lawsuits, the
Obama administration found tens of thousands of
pages after it previously said it couldn’t find any. The
website Gawker sued the State Department last year
after it said it couldn’t find any emails that Philippe
Reines, an aide to Hillary Clinton and former deputy
assistant secretary of state, had sent to journalists.
After the lawsuit, the agency said it found 90,000
documents about correspondence between Reines
and reporters. In one email, Reines wrote to a reporter,
“I want to avoid FOIA,” although Reines’ lawyer
later said he was joking.
When the government says it can’t find records,
it rarely provides detailed descriptions about how it
searched for them. Under the law, federal employees
are required to make a reasonable search, and a
1991 U.S. circuit court ruling found that a worker’s
explanation about how he conducted a search is “accorded
a presumption of good faith, which cannot be
rebutted by purely speculative claims” that a better
search might have turned up files.
“They do really crappy searches,” said Washington
lawyer Kel McClanahan of National Security
Counselors Inc., which handles transparency and national
security cases. He lost a federal appeals case in
November on behalf of a U.S. citizen, Sharif Mobley,
trying to obtain U.S. records that might show why he
has been imprisoned in Yemen since 2010. The court
President Barack Obama smiles as he listens to Irish
Prime Minister Enda Kenny speak during their
meeting in the Oval Office of the White House in
Washington.
said the FBI wasn’t required to search for files in locations
and ways Mobley’s lawyers wanted.
Under the records law, citizens and foreigners can
compel the U.S. government to turn over copies of
federal records for zero or little cost. Anyone who
seeks information through the law is generally supposed
to get it unless disclosure would hurt national
security, violate personal privacy or expose business
secrets or confidential decision-making in certain areas.
Overall, the Obama administration censored materials
it turned over or fully denied access to them
in a record 596,095 cases, or 77 percent of all requests.
That includes 250,024 times when the government
said it couldn’t find records, a person refused to pay
for copies or the government determined the request
to be unreasonable or improper. The White House
routinely excludes those cases from its own assessment.
Under that calculation, the administration
said it released all or parts of records in 93 percent
of requests.
More than half of federal agencies took longer to
answer requests last year than the previous year.