Lawsuit Filed After FBI Denies FOIA Because It Would Embarrass … – Observer

President Donald Trump. Darren McCollester/Getty Images

In June 2017,Operation 45(a nonprofit dedicated to transparency and accountability from the Trump administration), MIT Ph.D. candidate Ryan Shapiro, and BuzzFeed Investigative Reporter Jason Leopold fileda Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requestlawsuitagainst the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to release its files on President Donald Trump. A press release announcing the lawsuit states, The records requested, which cover a period from June 14, 1946, through June 15, 2015, will shed new light on already known investigations linking Trump to organized crime and will provide new information about Trumps engagements with the bureau.

The Freedom of Information Act is one of the most underappreciatedelements of the entire American experiment, Ryan Shapiro said in an interview with the Observer. The notion that the governments records are the property of the people, and all we need to do to get them isto ask is radically democratic.

The group initially filed the request in March 2017, but they never received a response from the FBI. The project noted the FBI has improperly withheld responsive records on the grounds that confirming the existence or nonexistence of records would infringe Mr. Trumps privacy interests. They argued the fallacy of this excuse and cited that the public interest in these records outweighs any embarrassment Trump may face.

Several of the files that the group seeks relate to the FBIs investigations into Trumps ties with organized crime syndicates, which Pulitzer Prize winning journalist David Cay Johnston has been working for years to try to uncover. Johnstonwrote for Politico in April 2016, In all, Ive covered Donald Trump off and on for 27 years, and in that time Ive encountered multiple threads linking Trump to organized crime. Some of Trumps unsavory connections have been followed by investigators and substantiated in court; some havent. And some of those links have continued until recent years, though when confronted with evidence of such associations, Trump has often claimed a faulty memory. In anApril 27phone call to respond to my questions for this story, Trump told me he did not recall many of the events recounted in this article and they were a long time ago. He also said that I had sometimes been fair, sometimes not in writing about him, adding, If I dont like what you write, Ill sue you. Johnston outlined how Trump relied on New York City mob connections in the 1980s to build Trump Tower and casinos in Atlantic City. He also relied on several colleagues and acquaintances with organized crime connections.

Despite the gravity of the FBIs files, its unclear if and when the public will receive access to themeven with a pendinglawsuit.The Freedom of Information Act has been a vital tool for journalists, but its power is diminishing.Several journalists have complained about the Obama and Trump administrations failure or refusal to adhere to the Freedom of Information Act in a timely fashion. IBTimes investigative reporter David Sirotatweetedin March 2017, Federal and state agencies put up so many obstacles to open records requests that theyre turning FOIA into the Freedom FROM Information Act. He addedon July 13, Two years ago, I filed a FOIA for TPP-related documents from the U.S. Trade Reps office. They still havent responded.

The Obama administration set a record for withholding FOIA requests. The Wall Street Journalreportedin 2015, FOIA request backlogs have more than doubled since President Obama took office. The feds received 714,231 FOIA requests in fiscal 2014, and nearly 160,000 werent processed within the legal time limit, up 67 percent from fiscal 2013. So far, there is no indication that the Trump administration will improve these delays, rejections and refusals to comply with the Freedom of Information Act.

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Lawsuit Filed After FBI Denies FOIA Because It Would Embarrass ... - Observer