Dear Friend of Press Freedom,
I’m Lauren Harper, the first Daniel Ellsberg chair on government secrecy at Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF), and welcome to The Classifieds. Read on to learn about this week’s top secrecy news.
DOJ indicts Fauci adviser over FOIA evasion
In a highly unusual move, the Justice Department has indicted Dr. David Morens, a former senior scientific adviser at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, for conspiring to evade Freedom of Information Act requests regarding COVID-19 research.
NIAID’s Morens allegedly collaborated with the National Institutes of Health FOIA Office to scrub his emails, going so far as to say: “i learned from our foia lady here how to make emails disappear after i am foia’d but before the search starts. ... Plus i deleted most of those earlier emails after sending them to my gmail.”
Morens’ actions were undeniably egregious and wrong, but the over-the-top arrest of the 78-year-old — which included agents wearing tactical gear forcing Morens to take off his shirt and pants — is cruel, absurd, and unprecedented. Even filing criminal charges is unusual; the closest parallels include the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private server, and the case of Bill Clinton’s national security adviser, Sandy Berger, who repeatedly stole classified records from the National Archives and Records Administration. For comparison, Berger was sentenced to 100 hours of community service, was issued a $50,000 fine, and lost his law license.
Taking a tough line against officials for evading FOIA is one thing, but forcing a septuagenarian to undress as part of the arrest is insane. It’s also impossible to ignore that while the Justice Department is pursuing Morens:
- The DOJ is facilitating Donald Trump’s efforts to evade the Presidential Records Act, and effectively shielding presidential papers from past and future FOIA requests in the process.
- Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. shuttered most of his department’s FOIA offices, and NIAID’s is largely nonfunctioning right now as a result.
- Federal agencies routinely brush off FOIA requesters with illegitimate excuses for not being able to process their requests.
- FOIA officers are being fired for making lawful releases of information that contradicts the administration’s narrative.
If we are moving toward a future where officials are held criminally liable for obstructing FOIA, the precedent must be applied with total impartiality. That doesn’t appear to be what’s happening right now.
Palantir is mining your IRS data
Newly released FOIA records obtained by American Oversight show the Internal Revenue Service has been using Palantir software to analyze huge amounts of data on Americans maintained by the IRS and other agencies since 2018. The IRS began using Palantir’s Lead and Case Analytics during Trump’s first term, grew its use under Biden, and appears to be escalating it even further — in yet another example of a threat to your personal data.
This latest revelation underscores the urgency of a recent FPF lawsuit, which demands to know the full scope of how every federal agency is complying with Trump’s mandate to effectively eviscerate your privacy protections.
What I'm reading
The Trump administration is dismantling FOIA
The Trump administration is currently playing a cynical game of weaponizing FOIA against Biden-era officials, while systematically gutting the law from within. I joined fellow experts in telling NOTUS that long-standing administrative flaws are being exploited on a larger scale than ever before, resulting in a “litigation-only” system that is fundamentally anti-democratic.
Pentagon erases wounded U.S. troops from Iran war casualty list: ‘Definition of a cover-up’
The Pentagon recently scrubbed 15 names from its Iran conflict casualty count — dropping the number from 428 to 413 — without any explanation. Even the higher number is likely an undercount, as the system that tracks casualties is missing “hundreds of known” incidents.
CIA ran MK-Ultra experiments on prisoners of war in U.S. custody, declassified docs confirm
Declassified documents recently published by the nonprofit National Security Archive (where I used to work) confirm that the U.S. carried out experiments on POWs during the Korean War. These experiments, which included enhanced interrogation techniques — or torture — became the basis for the CIA’s MK-Ultra project. The declassified memos show the 1950s operation had a budget of $65,515, and that interrogation teams included a hypnotist who would try to attain “personality control” over the prisoners. If you’re interested in reading more declassified documents on MK-Ultra, check out the Archive’s postings, “The top secret testimony of CIA’s MK-Ultra chief, 50 years later” and “CIA behavior control experiments focus of new scholarly collection.”
Transparently yours,
Lauren Harper
Daniel Ellsberg Chair on Government Secrecy
Freedom of the Press Foundation
