Transparency News 4/10/17

Monday, April 10, 2017



State and Local Stories

In case you missed it, check out Transparency Virginia’s 3rd annual report on legislative transparency.
Transparency Virginia

Dorothy Abernathy, longtime Virginia bureau chief for The Associated Press, has been honored by The Virginia Press Association with its Lifetime Achievement Award for exceptional contributions to the newspaper industry. Abernathy was honored Saturday at the association's annual conference. She is retiring in June after a 35-year career with the AP, including more than 25 years as bureau chief in Richmond, Virginia's capital.
Free Lance-Star
(NOTE: Abernathy has served on VCOG’s board of directors for 20 years and is a one-time president of the organization.)

One of the University of Virginia’s libraries will house the public papers of five-term Sen. John W. Warner, R-Va. The Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library opened the papers to the public last week, after a nine-year effort to catalog and organize the documents.
Richmond Times-Dispatch

Fourteen months ago, a potential witness in a failed state economic development initiative contacted the governor’s trade secretary, chief of staff and top spokesman, offering to tell what he knew about principal players in a $1.4 million Appomattox deal gone bad. “The parties involved need to be held accountable,” Wes Hardin wrote in a Jan. 21, 2016, email to a top state Cabinet official. Silence has answered him, despite vows from the governor’s office for a state investigation more than a year ago.
Roanoke Times

Warren County Public Schools must make its websites accessible for people with disabilities, a federal agency says. The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights notified Superintendent L. Greg Drescher in a Feb. 23 letter that the agency “received a complaint alleging Warren County Public Schools … discriminates on the basis of disability.” A department spokesman said by email Friday that the office can confirm it opened an investigation into possible disability discrimination related to website access. “Specifically, the Complainant alleges that certain pages of the Recipient’s website are not accessible to students and adults with disabilities including, but not limited to, vision impairments,” the notification states, listing eight addresses. The agency didn’t divulge the origin of the complaint. An attorney for the school system stated in a letter to the federal agency that Warren County schools did not receive the complaint directly.
Northern Virginia Daily

GOP gubernatorial candidate Ed Gillespie disclosed more names of his 2016 consulting clients on Friday. They include the Institute for Energy Research, a think tank that has given President Donald Trump advice on energy.  State law does not require statewide candidates to release the names of businesses operating in Virginia to whom they provided services. But last week, Gillespie voluntarily identified them as AT&T, Anthem, Microsoft and Bank of America. On Friday, at the request of the Richmond Times-Dispatch, Gillespie’s campaign identified four clients for whom he consulted in 2016 who did business outside Virginia: The Institute for Energy Research and its affiliate American Energy Alliance, communication company Brunswick Group, and public affairs and communication company DCI Group.
Richmond Times-Dispatch



National Stories
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Legislation allowing nonresidents of Delaware to request public records under the state's Freedom of Information Act ran into a roadblock Wednesday in the General Assembly. Currently, public bodies do not have to respond to FOIA requests from anyone who is not a resident of Delaware. The proposed legislation, which was tabled in committee Wednesday, would remove that restriction while allowing state agencies and public bodies to charge higher fees to nonresidents, as long as they reasonably reflect the costs needed to defray expenses.
Charlotte Observer

Arkansas Freedom of Information Act experts and watchdogs say they worry how far the new secrecy will extend. Security-records closures in some cases "were not bad ideas. Unfortunately, the bills went way too far by closing 'records and other information," said Arkansas Press Association Executive Director Tom Larimer. That phrase could be broadly interpreted, he said, to include "just about anything" pertaining to the agencies. His group opposed all three bills. Law professor and Freedom of Information Act textbook author Robert Steinbuch points to one of those new laws -- Senate Bill 131, now Act 474 -- that exempts disclosure of security records of the State Capitol Police.
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

BuzzFeed News and journalist Jason Leopold are suing the FBI, claiming that the agency failed to adequately respond to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for material on Andrew Breitbart, The Wrap reported Friday. The lawsuit alleges that Leopold filed the request for "all records related to Andrew Breitbart" with the FBI in August 2012, five months after the Breitbart News founder died of heart failure. The agency responded to the request in September, saying that they did not locate any such records in their "main file records." Leopold's effort to appeal the FBI's response was rejected by the Justice Department's Office of Information Policy in 2013, which argued that "the FBI is not required to perform cross-reference searches unless the requester provides ‘information sufficient to enable the FBI to determine with certainty that any cross-references it locates are identifiable to the subject of [the] request,’" according to the lawsuit. That information, the Justice Department allegedly said, would have included "the dates and locations of contacts between the subject of the request and the FBI, the subject’s social security number, or other such information." BuzzFeed's and Leopold's lawsuit argues that the FOIA statute does not require a requester to provide any of that information in order for an agency to conduct a cross-reference search.
The Hill

For the past 16 months, when a notable person dies, Parker Higgins sends a letter to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Each letter is the same, except for the name, and makes the same request: Hand over the FBI file for the deceased. Higgins then posts the file online, in its entirety, with a link to the obit. He calls it “FOIA the Dead: a morbid transparency project.” Its icon is a little pixilated skull. Since Higgins started his project in 2015, he has posted 29 files for people whose common traits are 1) they merited a New York Times obituary; 2) the FBI had a file on them and was willing to turn it over.
Star Tribune

A free-market watchdog is calling on President Trump to release documents that were sought under the Freedom of Information Act requests that were blocked during the Obama administration, and in particular wants Trump to release documents related to the policies he's thinking about overturning. Chris Horner is a senior fellow at the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute think tank, which advances "limited government, free enterprise, and individual liberty." Horner argues that if the Trump administration is as focused on overturning Obama-era rules and regulations as it has promised to be, it only makes sense that the government release documents showing how those rules were created in the first place.
Washington Examiner

The Justice Department is refusing to disclose letters of resignation from U.S. attorneys who left their posts at the request of the Trump administration. The letters — sent by public officials in response to a directive from the president and the attorney general — are so "inherently personal" that they are exempt from release, a Justice Department lawyer wrote in rejecting a Freedom of Information Act request from the Burlington Free Press.
Burlington Free Press


Editorials/Columns


The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of Virginia’s Freedom of Information Act: A Citizen Experiment // How easy or hard is it for average Virginia citizens to access records they have a legal right to? That was the question me and nineteen students in the State and Local Government class I teach at Christopher Newport University sought to answer. In recognition of Sunshine Week, each student selected a state or local agency in Virginia and used FOIA to request a record of interest. In summary, there was an overall positive experience for these young citizens, but there were still some problems.
Dr. James Toscano