Undead FOIA 3.0

🚨 BREAKING: Heaviest strikes across Iran since the start of the war IRGC leaders getting targeted in the north of Tehran.

Today the FBI filed a motion to quash our discovery requests in the Seth Rich case (i.e., Huddleston v. FBI), and it’s a real cheap shot. The FBI tried to frame it as if we were ignoring previous court orders denying discovery about Seth Rich, but our discovery requests were not targeted at Seth Rich. Instead, they were targeted at the FBI’s overall pattern of hiding documents from FOIA requestors. That distinction is critical, and the FBI knows it. True enough, discovery is typically not allowed in a FOIA case. We’ve never disputed that. But Huddleston v. FBI is not just a standard FOIA case. In 2024, the presiding judge allowed us to file a supplemental complaint, and that complaint had nothing to do with Seth Rich or any other particular FOIA request. Instead, we asked the court to enjoin the FBI from hiding records from FOIA requestors via various schemes and tricks set forth in the supplemental complaint. I’ll file a response to the FBI’s motion, and hopefully this case will start moving faster. On another front, the court largely denied our motion to hold the FBI in contempt for violating its orders to produce records from Seth Rich’s laptops. Instead, the court gave the feds 60 days to explain why they did not produce or account for all of the data on the laptops. That was a disappointing result, but the battle is not over. If you want to know more about what the FBI is trying to hide, you can look at the supplemental complaint, the discovery requests, and the FBI’s motion (links below). I’ve also posted a link to the court’s order denying our motion to hold the FBI in contempt.