Franklin County residents are raising concerns about the possibility of a data center being built at Summit View Business Park after a local woman used Freedom of Information Act requests to uncover county communications with a company that builds them. Laura Carter, a Franklin County resident, began submitting FOIA requests for county supervisors’ emails in the spring. Her initial focus was the county’s zoning ordinance rewrite. While reviewing hundreds of emails, she found a reference to something called “Project Flash.” Carter said she first became engaged in county affairs after learning about a zoning ordinance open house and began attending board meetings starting March 26. “Just seeing how these people were acting about certain issues that affect the whole county really started to raise alarm bells for me about a lot of different things,” Carter said. “One of the line items referenced Project Flash, and the citizens had never heard of this, you know. I hadn’t heard. So, I’m like, hmm, you know, why is there this project? You also have to pay attention to the fact that our board has been having closed session, closed session, closed session, meeting after meeting,” Carter said. Carter also received a non-disclosure agreement and a confidentiality agreement between the county and a company whose name was redacted.

A Virginia State Police internal affairs investigation includes records pertaining to the agency’s presence in Loudoun County. Loudoun Now learned about the investigation when a records request for materials pertaining to ongoing reassessments of the number of state troopers assigned to the county was denied. State Police records staff said the denial was because the records “are now part of an active administrative investigation” being carried out by VSP’s Internal Affairs Section. The records staff said that “records concerning an administrative investigation relating to allegations of wrongdoing by employees of a law-enforcement agency are exempt from the production requirements of the Virginia Freedom of Information Act.”

The Supreme Court on Thursday let stand a lower-court order that forces former Fox News reporter Catherine Herridge to either disclose a confidential source or pay $800 a day in court sanctions. In a brief, unsigned order, the justices denied Herridge’s emergency application to stay the U.S. District Court for the D.C. Circuit’s sanctions against her for refusing to identify an anonymous source. . . . Chinese American scientist Yanping Chen alleged in a 2018 lawsuit that Herridge, a veteran journalist who has worked for Fox News and now runs her own newsletter, breached federal privacy law by identifying details about her in Fox News stories published beginning in 2017. Herridge refused to explain how she learned of a federal probe into Chen, who operated a graduate program in Virginia.