Two months ago, Attorney General Pam Bondi issued a memo giving the Trump administration permission to accept a $400 million jet from Qatar to use as Air Force One.

The memo, which has never been made public, argued this was permissible as long as the plane was transferred to the Trump presidential library foundation at the end of Trump’s term.

The public should know how Bondi came to this conclusion.

That’s why today the Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF), represented by watchdog group American Oversight, filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit to force the Justice Department to release the memo.

We had no choice. The government’s inability to administer FOIA makes it too easy for agencies to keep secrets and for nonexistent disclosure rules around donations to presidential libraries to provide easy cover for bad actors.

620 days to search for one document

FOIA has long been neglected by Democratic and Republican administrations alike. Backlogs have soared and dedicated funding is nonexistent, meaning FOIA offices have to compete for resources.

But the challenges FOIA offices now face under Trump’s “most transparent administration in history,” including the mass firing of FOIA officials, may prove debilitating.

FPF’s FOIA request for the Bondi memo encapsulates the state of the problem.

FPF filed a FOIA for this single document in May and was granted expedited processing, which means the government acknowledged the public interest in the request. How quickly would we get the document, we asked? The Justice Department’s FOIA office told us that its search would likely take 620 days.

That’s right. It said it would take 620 days to search for an important document that any number of Justice Department officials could easily find in their inboxes within minutes.

Who knows how many flights Trump will have taken on his new plane by the time the Justice Department releases the memo?

Presidential libraries shouldn’t be a conduit for bribes

In addition to the Qatari jet, the Trump presidential library has received $15 million from an ABC News settlement in a defamation suit filed by Trump and $16 million from Paramount’s settlement in another Trump case over the editing of Kamala Harris’ “60 Minutes” interview.

The Paramount settlement came at the same time the company was seeking approval from the Federal Communications Commission for its planned merger with Skydance (now granted), prompting many to say the settlement stinks of bribery.

Equally concerning is that the public only knows about these donations because of high-profile litigation and the diligent work of reporters.

We have no idea how many other donations have been made to Trump’s library foundation because scant disclosure requirements enable anonymous “gifts” from sources that may be eager to avoid normal campaign disclosure requirements.

The Trump team has apparently figured that out and is exploiting it. We need to understand the Justice Department’s legal basis for allowing this problem to fester.

The public deserves to know

If Bondi is confident in the legal basis for allowing a sitting president of the United States to accept an exorbitant gift from a foreign government, she should release it in response to our FOIA lawsuit.

And if she won’t, the courts must step in.

Much more than just the fate of a luxury jet hangs in the balance.