The Office of the Attorney General released a dataset on Monday which refuted claims made for months by Republican Attorney General Jason Miyares about the danger of inmates released early because of the enhanced earned sentence credit program. The data was revised after Cardinal News shared the results of its analysis of an earlier dataset provided by the Office of the Attorney General in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. In July, Miyares asserted that “53 Virginians were murdered” because of the state’s early release program. He doubled down on that claim in October, and increased the number of Virginians who were murdered to 70. The attorney general’s office, in partnership with the Department of Corrections, provided corrected data and analysis to Cardinal News on Monday evening. After further analysis of data originally provided to Cardinal News, the attorney general’s office and the Department of Corrections determined that only 72 of the 78 people listed on the initial dataset benefited from enhanced earned sentence credits, Kenney said in an email on Monday. Of those 72 people, only 13 had been convicted of a homicide-related offense.
Loudoun County Public Schools administrators provided some data on reports of hate speech to a School Board committee last week, two months after telling Loudoun Now the information did not exist or could not be released. When Loudoun Now asked for the information in August, division public information officer Dan Adams said the information was included in students’ discipline files and would not be released.
A conservative transparency group filed a lawsuit Monday, accusing the FBI of systematically violating federal law by blocking access to public records, a problem the group says has persisted for years across administrations despite President Donald Trump’s pledge to lead the “most transparent” government in history. The Oversight Project, a nonprofit group formerly affiliated with the Heritage Foundation, filed the complaint in Washington, D.C. federal court, seeking to compel the FBI to fix what it calls a “pattern and practice” of stonewalling Freedom of Information Act requests. The group says the FBI has long used bureaucratic tricks, blanket denials, and unlawful “Glomar” responses — refusing to confirm or deny the existence of records — to conceal politically sensitive information from the public.