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Scott Pruitt’s resignation as head of the Environmental Protection Agency this month was preceded by a steady drumbeat of revelatory stories — from The Times and others — about his misuse of government resources. Some of the most remarkable of those stories were underpinned by information obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA. The law, first enacted in 1966, and significantly strengthened after Watergate in 1974, gives the public the right to access records from any federal agency, with a handful of exceptions, and states have similar open-records laws that grant the same general right at the local level. Anyone can file an open records request. It was a request from the liberal nonprofit American Oversight, for example, that gave Ms. Friedman and her colleagues a detailed accounting of Mr. Pruitt’s calendar — which showed that he spent much of his time with major members of the industries that he was in charge of regulating and almost no time meeting with environmental and public health groups, among other things. But to journalists, they are essential tools. Times journalists file requests every day in search of documents ranging from emails sent by top bureaucrats to records about Taser use in a particular police department. Submitting a request is often as simple as writing an email to an entity’s designated open records coordinator.
The New York Times
Even amid heightened concerns around the country of government officials using new technology to conduct business in secret and evade transparency laws, New Hampshire lawmakers had been free to use good, old email to communicate outside the public eye for years. Then House Chief of Staff Terry Pfaff pulled the plug on the private legislative distribution list. Pfaff said he’d grown concerned it was being used in violation of the state’s right-to-know law. “There were sequential emails taking place that were discussing pending legislation that was bordering on the edge of the right-to-know rules and even our rules within the House,” Pfaff said.
Concord Monitor
The lawyer representing Michaella Surat was admonished for his release of body camera footage showing her arrest to the Coloradoan and a Denver TV station.
Coloradoan
In a quest to shrink national monuments last year, senior Interior Department officials dismissed evidence that these public sites boosted tourism and spurred archaeological discoveries, according to documents the department released this month and retracted a day later. The thousands of pages of email correspondence chart how Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke and his aides instead tailored their survey of protected sites to emphasize the value of logging, ranching and energy development that would be unlocked if they were not designated national monuments. Comments the department’s Freedom of Information Act officers made in the documents show that they sought to keep some of the references out of the public eye because they were “revealing [the] strategy” behind the review.
The Washington Post
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