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.
Who might ICE be lying to? Us, or a federal judge?
Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) is demanding answers after Immigration and Customs Enforcement claimed it has no body camera footage from Operation Midway Blitz in Chicago, despite a federal judge’s explicit order that agents wear and activate those cameras.
“ICE might be ignoring a court order or lying in response to our FOIA request,” said Lauren Harper, FPF’s Ellsberg Chair on Government Secrecy.
“Our request to ICE was crystal clear. We asked for all body worn camera footage from Operation Midway Blitz. We expected to receive at least some footage because U.S. District Judge Sara Ellis ordered ICE and other immigration agents to wear those cameras, saying doing so, and turning them on, ‘wasn’t a suggestion.’
“Yet ICE just informed us it found no records in response to our FOIA. So who might ICE be lying to? Us, or the federal judge?
“We’re pursuing all of our options in this FOIA to get to the bottom of it — and send ICE a clear message: it is not the secret police or exempt from accountability.”
DHS says Noem has no Truth Social DMs. That sounds like BS.
When President Donald Trump inadvertently published a direct message to Attorney General Pam Bondi as a public post on his social media site, Truth Social, it showed he was continuing his first-term habit of conducting official business on social media.
This prompted FPF to send Freedom of Information Act requests to all cabinet officials with active Truth Social accounts for copies of their DMs. One of the officials whose DMs we requested was Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who posts regularly on the site.
Because Noem’s account is as active as Bondi’s, we expected the agency to locate at least some records. This week, however, DHS told me that it had conducted a “comprehensive review” for the records and couldn’t find any.
We are unconvinced. Whether DHS genuinely found no records or simply failed to conduct an adequate search to avoid potentially providing any of Trump’s messages to officials, its response raises more questions than it answers. We are appealing the DHS denial to get to the bottom of it.
Trump’s presidential library facade
The Trump administration is allegedly concerned that restrictive oversight by the National Archives and Records Administration of presidential libraries may be so onerous to building Trump’s as-yet hypothetical presidential library “that new legislation might be needed to provide more flexibility for Trump’s library.”
The idea that NARA’s oversight has ever been, or might be, onerous, is absurd; there is no requirement that Trump build a presidential library at all (and he probably won’t because it would require him to give NARA a lot of money to run it), and no law on the books would stop Trump from simply building a massive hotel and calling it a presidential center. So why would the Trump team consider any new legislation around presidential libraries?
My fear is that the true aim is not presidential libraries — but presidential records. Trump has expressed repeated frustrations, from not being able to keep his own records after his first term at Mar-a-Lago to not being able to give King Charles a sword belonging to President Dwight Eisenhower, that he can’t do whatever he wants with presidential records and artifacts. My bet? He wants presidential records to be private property again.
What I'm Reading
House passes Pentagon bill pressuring Hegseth to release boat strike evidence
The House passed the national defense policy bill, with a provision that, unless Secretary Pete Hegseth provides unedited videos of the boat strikes, he will lose 25 percent of his travel budget. It’s a creative way to force disclosure, but unfortunately the bill doesn’t require public disclosure of the videos, just that Congress gets to see them.
Advocacy groups sue Trump administration seeking release of legal memo justifying boat strikes
The American Civil Liberties Union, the New York Civil Liberties Union, and the Center for Constitutional Rights have filed a FOIA lawsuit demanding the release of the Trump administration’s legal justification for conducting lethal boat strikes. Read the complaint here.
Republicans want Big Tech to stop hosting DHS enforcement-tracking apps
It wasn’t enough for some lawmakers that the Justice Department talked Google and Apple stores into taking down ICE-tracking apps. The House Homeland Security Committee is following up with the tech companies to “better understand” the efforts they are taking to deplatform these apps.
Transparently yours,
Lauren Harper
Daniel Ellsberg Chair on Government Secrecy
Freedom of the Press Foundation
