Tag: foia

‘Maximally transparent’ DOGE now tells federal court its records are ‘not subject to FOIA’ requests 

While standing next to President Donald Trump in the Oval Office earlier this month, billionaire Elon Musk, the de facto head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), claimed that his team had been “maximally transparent” as the Trump administration seeks to gut the federal workforce. But in recent court filings, the government said it will not provide DOGE records to the public under Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, claiming that the organization is exempt from the law.

Justice Department attorneys on Thursday filed court documents in connection with a FOIA lawsuit in Washington, D.C., wherein they state that Trump’s executive order redesignated the U.S. Digital Service as the U.S. DOGE Service, removing the organization from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to make it a “free-standing component of the Executive Office of the President.”

As such, the government claimed that DOGE is “not subject to FOIA.”

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FOIA-Released Emails Mention Alleged Triangular UAP Photo; Former UAP Task Force Director Speaks Out

Newly released documents obtained by The Black Vault through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) under case 21-F-0299 reveal email exchanges within the Department of Defense (DoD) discussing a photograph reportedly showing a triangular Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon (UAP) emerging from the ocean. The FOIA request was originally filed in December 2020. Along with these documents, John “Jay” Stratton, former Director of the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF), has now spoken exclusively to The Black Vault about this claim, offering brand-new clarification that no such photograph depicting a triangular craft emerging from the ocean was ever received by the UAPTF.

The long-rumored photograph in question gained significant attention following a December 2020 article by The Debrief, which described an “extremely clear” image of a large triangular object with rounded edges and white spherical lights in each corner. According to the article, the photograph was allegedly taken in 2019 by an F/A-18 fighter pilot after the object emerged from the ocean and ascended vertically. The story quickly became one of the most talked-about pieces of evidence that the DoD was allegedly withholding, with references by public figures such as Luis Elizondo which fueled widespread discussion across social media.

The FOIA-released emails, dated December 3 and 4, 2020, show internal communication within the DoD discussing The Debrief article. In one email addressed to Susan Gough (her name is redacted in the “to:” line but not in the body of the email), someone (name redacted) from the Deputy Chief of Naval Operations (DCNO) office states, “Jay [Stratton] tells me the photo is part of the active investigation, so it would probably be withheld from release for that reason.”

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FDA Misled The Judiciary About Pfizer’s Vaccine Documents

On December 6, 2024, a federal judge ordered the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to release documents related to the emergency use authorisation of Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine. These documents had been hidden from public view.

The legal battle traces back to September 2021, when attorney Aaron Siri filed a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) on behalf of the Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency. The plaintiffs sought access to the vast trove of documents the FDA relied on to approve Pfizer’s vaccine.

Initially, the FDA proposed a slow release schedule. In November 2021, the agency stated it would release just 500 pages per month—a pace that would have stretched the full disclosure process to 75 years. 

However, in January 2022, District Judge Mark Pittman of Texas rejected the FDA’s proposal, ordering the agency to expedite its release to 55,000 pages per month, aiming to complete the disclosure of all 450,000 pages by August 2022.

As the documents trickled out, researchers began uncovering glaring gaps that prevented a systematic review of the data. These gaps fueled suspicions about what else the FDA might be withholding. 

It became evident that the FDA had withheld records directly tied to its emergency use authorisation of Pfizer’s vaccine, estimated to be over one million pages. 

These documents, which the FDA had full knowledge of, were excluded from earlier disclosures, effectively misleading the judiciary and undermining public trust.

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Indiana Police Refuse FOIA Request for Video Evidence in Shooting of January 6th Patriot by Sheriff’s Deputy

As reported earlier, a J6 political prisoner pardoned by Trump was killed by an Indiana police officer over the weekend.

FOX 32 Chicago reported at 4:15 p.m. local time Sunday that 42-year-old Matthew W. Huttle of Hobart, Indiana, was stopped by a Jasper County sheriff’s deputy during a traffic stop near the Pulaski County line.  Police say the deputy attempted to arrest Huttle after stopping him, but the civilian resisted.

The officer responded by firing his weapon and killing Huttle following a supposed fight.

Investigative journalist Yehuda Miller and The Gateway Pundit reached out to Jasper County Sheriff Williamson following the news of the deadly shooting. We FOIAed video of the incident from the police cameras.

Sheriff Williamson told us that because this was an open investigation, he would not release the footage!

The video will only be released when the investigation is completed.

“This is an open investigation by the Indiana State Police. In the near future when this investigation has been completed, we will provide video footage via our Jasper County Sheriff Website for you to view,” Sheriff Williamson told Miller.

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FAA Emails Shed Light on UAP Tracking Amid Chinese Balloon Scare

In response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed in May 2023 by The Black Vault, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has released 129 pages of documents concerning emails sent to and from Michael Freie, a technical advisor in the FAA’s Air Traffic Surveillance Services Office.

The request, FOIA case 2024-04951, sought communications containing keywords such as “Unidentified Aerial,” “Unidentified Flying,” “UAP,” “UFO,” and related terms.

The FOIA request stemmed from Mr. Freie’s involvement as a speaker at NASA’s Public UAP Meeting held on May 31, 2023. Known for his expertise in air traffic surveillance, Freie has served as a critical figure within the FAA, providing insights into the systems monitoring U.S. airspace and their limitations. During the meeting, he delivered a detailed explanation of how the FAA monitors civilian airspace and the ongoing challenges in identifying and tracking objects that deviate from typical flight behaviors.

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New Documents Highlight Drone Sightings Near Nuclear Facilities

A Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by The Black Vault on November 7, 2024, with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, resulted in the release of records highlighting drone incursions over sensitive nuclear installations. The request, identified as FOIA-2025-000142, sought all materials and communications shared with the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) from June 2022 through the end of 2024.

While UFO enthusiasts may have hoped for evidence of extraordinary phenomena, the documents largely revolve around repeated sightings of drones near sensitive nuclear installations.

Nonetheless, these incidents provide an intriguing insight into ongoing challenges relating to these events.

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Biden White House Worked Directly with the City of Chicago to Place Immigrants Across the State While Leaving Homeless Chicagoans to Freeze

A recent FOIA request made by Terry Newsome of Behind Enemy Lines revealed that the Biden White House worked directly with the City of Chicago placing immigrants.

Throughout an email chain of 207 pages, City of Chicago officials, FEMA representatives, and a Special Assistant to the President of the United States discuss different locations for placing immigrants across the State of Illinois.

The Gateway Pundit previously reported that FEMA had awarded approximately $20 million to the City of Chicago for food service contractors to feed illegal immigrants.

The award timeframe was from October 2022 to December 2024. This article also details the City of Chicago’s ‘Vendor Payments – New Arrivals Mission’ webpage detailing the $574.5 million that has been spent on the immigrant crisis thus far.

It’s relevant to note that the recent trove of FOIA emails between the White House, city officials, and FEMA reference an amount of $20 million being released from an embargo.

This could be the amount that was allocated to food services. However, the recent email chain only discusses placing immigrants in facilities, warming and transporting them in buses, and reports a detailed census on the new arrivals.

Given the context of the recent email chain, it’s plausible that the $20 million referenced could be in addition to the food services funds and reserved for these location and transportation services.

It has been established that the Federal Government has not only allowed the immigrant invasion at the border, but it has also funded it with tax dollars.

It is not surprising that distrust in government is at an all-time high. While Americans in Florida and North Carolina suffer from hurricane fallout, non-citizens are reaping the benefits of shelter, food, clothing, and cell phones.

Most egregious, the unit of government designated to deal with Emergency Response – FEMA – is funding the care for the illegal immigrants.

In other words, the government intentionally created an emergency of illegal immigration, diverted funds away from tax paying Americans who need emergency response, and applied them to non-citizens.

Things get more interesting as Special Assistant to the President of the United States, Molly Ritner, enters the scene.

City of Chicago officials had requested information from the White House on available Federal sites for housing illegals. Special Assistant Ritner provides the following:

“32 federal sites across the State of Illinois were identified as having vacant space — this included review of potential space across federal agencies including DOD.”

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College Student Slapped With $84,000 Bill for FOIA Records

How much would you pay for information? A student at Grand Valley State University (GVSU) in Michigan is facing an $84,000 bill for records he requested under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) related to an ongoing school investigation against him.

Carrie Uthe, the student’s mother, told local news station WZZM 13 earlier this year that the bill was surprising. “They did give us a documentation to show that breakdown, but that still made no sense,” said Uthe. “It’s been very stressful for him. It has really played on him hard. He just wants to go to school. He wants to do well. He wants to get an education.”

It’s not uncommon for FOIA requests to come with a fee, meant to compensate for employee time spent on complying with the request and redacting ineligible information. However, WZZM13 spoke with Mike Walsh, an attorney and adjunct professor at GVSU, who said that he’s never seen a FIOA bill this hefty.

“Government agencies have a right to charge for their time and service to provide records, but the whole spirit of the law is to open things up, to share records with the true owners, which is you and me,” Walsh said. “So obviously that’s daunting for anybody to get a bill for $84,000 and it prevents people from going on to the next step of litigating or whatever they’re going to do to get things worked out. So that’s, that’s why I find it troubling.” 

According to a statement from GVSU administrators, the bill was so large because the student made an overly broad request. “Grand Valley used its normal process in calculating the fee for this request. The request is very broad would [sic] involve more than 59000 emails over a specified period,” their statement reads. “Fulfilling the request would require a qualified employee to sort through each individual email and attachment to search for and redact protected and personal information. Our FOIA officer has offered potential strategies that could narrow the inquiring party’s search to help reduce costs.” 

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In Email Obtained by ICAN, a Fauci Senior Advisor Admits CDC’s Data “Shockingly Messed Up” and Leaders Have “Serious Issues”

During a recent Congressional hearing, we learned that David Morens prided himself on his ability to avoid transparency and purposefully evade FOIA. The hearing revealed emails in which Morens boasted that he “learned from our [FOIA] lady here how to make most emails disappear” and “we are all smart enough to know to never have smoking guns, and if we did we wouldn’t put them in emails and if we found them we’d delete them.”

But in a recent FOIA production obtained by ICAN’s attorneys, we discovered that Morens failed to delete at least one smoking gun. In an April 2020 email to Greg Folkers, Fauci’s Chief of Staff, Morens made an astonishing admission about CDC’s long-term incompetence in handling data and NIH’s willingness to cover it up:

Greg, please keep this confidential but you should know that for over a decade the flu folks at CDC have shockingly messed up their tabulations of flu mortality. We discovered 5-10 years ago that various web page and published data were totally inconsistent and could only be explained by major uncaught errors[.]

… apparently various folks in [t]he flu division made and put up and published mutually-inconsistent figures based on differing subjective assumptions[.]

Several years ago, maybe 4-5, we reached out to the top flu people at CDC informing them that their own data were problematic, that as a sister agency we did NOT want to draw attention to it but work with them privately to fix and reconcile the problems. At first they were grateful, and set up a mechani[sm] to work with us, but then when they discovered the depths of their own mistakes … they did the usual CDC thing and circled the wagons, refused to return calls and emails, etc. [W]e didn’t pursue things but were left unsettled.

To repeat, this was at the level of cdc’s flu leadership. I think we have to accept that they have serious issues and have not fixed them.

Let’s not forget that throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, we were told to “trust the experts,” many of whom worked for CDC. Recommendations and edicts handed down from on high at CDC were treated as gospel. The few brave souls who had the courage to publicly question CDC’s judgment were met with derision, pejoratives, censorship, and attacks on their careers and reputations. This makes it all the more infuriating to learn that, according to Morens, the “usual CDC thing” to do when its mistakes are discovered is to ignore the problem and refuse to discuss it—even when the mistake is discovered by another government agency!

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Project Cyclops: Efforts in Hurricane Modification Showed Promising Results in 1961

In 1961, the U.S. Naval Ordnance Test Station (NOTS) conducted a groundbreaking experiment aimed at modifying hurricanes, a project known as “Project Cyclops.” This initiative involved an attempt to influence the behavior of hurricanes through cloud seeding, using a specially developed silver iodide dispersal system. The project’s most notable test took place on Hurricane Esther in September 1961.

The primary objective of Project Cyclops was to disrupt the structure of hurricanes by releasing silver iodide into their cloud systems. Silver iodide acts as a nucleating agent, encouraging the formation of ice crystals from supercooled water droplets within storm clouds. In theory, this process could alter the thermodynamics of a storm, potentially reducing its intensity.

The experiment was a joint effort between NOTS scientists and the Weather Bureau (now known as the National Weather Service, a part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration [NOAA]). A critical component of the experiment was the Cyclops device, designed to disperse silver iodide into the clouds from an aircraft. The first test was conducted over Hurricane Esther from a U.S. Naval Station in Puerto Rico. Eight Cyclops units were dropped into the northeast quadrant of the hurricane’s wall cloud.

The results were significant, with a “dramatic and radical change in the thermodynamics of the hurricane” observed for approximately one and a half hours following the seeding. The project report noted that the seeded area of the storm experienced a rapid conversion of supercooled water droplets into ice crystals. This led to the formation of a “cup-like” shape in the hurricane’s eye, with the wall cloud appearing to spread outwards. In the words of the report, “the changes in the form of the eye continued for at least an hour and a half,” during which time the eye’s shape oscillated and even resembled a figure 9 before returning to its original circular structure.

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