Tag: foia

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.

Keep reading

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.

Keep reading

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.

Keep reading

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.”

Keep reading

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.” 

Keep reading

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!

Keep reading

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.

Keep reading

NASA Denies Existence of Classified Briefings on James Webb Telescope Discoveries

In recent weeks, rumors spread rapidly on social media suggesting that NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) had made an extraordinary discovery—potentially alien life—and that members of Congress had been briefed about it.

The rumors intensified after U.S. Representative Andre Carson, who had previously chaired a congressional hearing on unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs), declined to answer a question about classified briefings when asked by @AskaPol_UAPs run by journalist Matt Laslo on X.

The speculation prompted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, filed by The Black Vault on September 22, 2024, seeking any records—classified or unclassified—about JWST briefings provided to Congress, particularly related to the telescope’s findings. The request aimed to clarify whether any congressional briefings had been held about significant discoveries made by JWST, which has been in operation since 2021.

Keep reading

The FOIA Lady Pleads the Fifth

Arelatively unknown public records officer at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is now at the centre of a burgeoning scandal involving Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.

The saga unfolded after subpoenaed emails belonging to David Morens, a former top advisor to Anthony Fauci, revealed that someone had taught him to game the system and avoid emails being captured by FOIA requests.

“i learned from our foia lady here how to make emails disappear after i am foia’d but before the search starts, so i think we are all safe,” Morens wrote in a Feb 24, 2021, email. “Plus i deleted most of those earlier emails after sending them to gmail.”

Morens implicated Margaret (Marg) Moore, known colloquially as “The FOIA lady” in trying to hide information from the American people, particularly that related to the origins of Covid-19, which is a felony.

It sparked an investigation by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic to expose what Chairman Brad Wenstrup (R-OH) called a “cover-up.”

A letter to NIH director Monica Bertagnolli in May suggested “a conspiracy at the highest levels” of these once trusted public health institutions.

“If what appears in these documents is true, this is an apparent attack on public trust and must be met with swift enforcement and consequences for those involved,” Wenstrup wrote.

Wenstrup said there was evidence that a former chief of staff of Fauci’s might have used intentional misspellings — such as “Ec~Health” instead of “EcoHealth” — to prevent emails from being captured in keyword searches by FOIA officials.

Keep reading

Facebook Gave CDC ‘Backdoor’ Access to Help Remove Millions of Social Media Posts

Facebook provided the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) “backdoor” access to its platform so the CDC could submit requests to remove COVID-19 “misinformation,” according to an internal Facebook document made public for the first time as part of an ongoing legal case.

America First Legal filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request in 2021, after then-White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki revealed the Biden administration was flagging purported “disinformation” on social media platforms, including content posted by members of the so-called “Disinformation Dozen.”

When the Biden administration didn’t comply with the FOIA request, America First Legal sued, leading to the release of the documents as part of the discovery process.

According to Reclaim the Net, in 2021, Facebook developed a “Content Request System” (see pages 54-72) — also called a “Government Reporting System” — accessible to CDC staff. The documents show Facebook “was operating as the de facto enforcement arm of the US government’s thought control initiative.”

The Facebook-CDC partnership helped Facebook remove millions of posts, the documents show.

Gene Hamilton, executive director of America First Legal, told The Defender, “These documents show precisely how one of the social media platforms facilitated the federal government’s engagement in unconstitutional censorship activities.”

“The federal government cannot violate the First Amendment by outsourcing censorship to the private sector, yet these documents clearly show that Facebook and the Biden-Harris administration collaborated and colluded on removing speech that did not comport with the federal government’s preferences,” Hamilton said.

Tim Hinchliffe, editor of The Sociable, told The Defender that following the release of the “Twitter Files,” it should not come as a surprise “that the government has been actively trying to censor citizens through back doors and loopholes.”

“This censorship effort is yet another example of a public-private collaboration that fuses corporation and state,” Hinchliffe said. “Where the government can’t legally censor, it has the private sector to do its bidding. The question here is how much coercion was needed for Facebook to provide the backdoor?”

Keep reading