OpenMarket: Freedom of Information

The Obama State Department pushed the line, via media contacts it called "validators," that the Paris Climate Agreement was not a treaty and didn’t need to be ratified the Senate. CEI has requested information on these “validators” through the Freedom of Information Act.

Governors Jay Inslee, Jerry Brown, and Andrew Cuomo have a radical agenda unconstrained by the law or basic decency.

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“Richard Windsor,” the first Obama administration false-identity email account discovered (by CEI), was apparently not an aberration but a way of life for Obama officials. That is now undeniable, in the face of the revelation that former Attorney General Loretta Lynch also...

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In a victory for government transparency and freedom of information, the California Supreme Court has just ruled that when a government employee uses a personal email account to communicate about public business, those emails “may be subject to disclosure...

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As of the first of this year, Utah joined the ranks of 32 states where Amazon collects sales tax.

The e-commerce giant has a physical presence in some of those states, but the others, including Utah, are ignoring the 1992 Supreme Court decision that exempts wholly out-of-state businesses from collecting taxes for states...

Yesterday CEI filed a lawsuit against New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman for refusing to disclose the legal agreements his office made with other state attorneys general and environmental activists as part of his “AGs United for Clean Power” campaign against climate skeptics. The Wall Street Journal covered the new development with a supportive editorial:

[CEI is] filing a suit under New York’s freedom of information law to ask the ringleader of the AG coalition—Empire State AG Schneiderman—to produce “any common interest...

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Do federal agencies have the right to shield their records from the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) just by transmitting work-related documents via private email? That would seem absurd on the face of it. The...

Under the Freedom of Information Act, you can obtain government records, but usually you have to pay for them. But the law limits the fees that can be charged certain types of requesters, including “educational institutions.” On Friday, in Sack v. U.S. Dept. of Defense, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit held that this means students seeking to use FOIA are eligible for reduced fees as well.

The court rejected the Obama administration’s argument that only teachers, not students, can take advantage of this provision. The statute itself draws no such...

Today, the Virginia Circuit Court in Richmond issued a ruling in our case under the Virginia Freedom of Information Act (VFOIA), Christopher Horner and Competitive Enterprise Institute v. George Mason University.  This is an important case in which we prevailed on all counts—seeking public records showing how the "RICO-20" group of academics used public funding to organize their call for a federal racketeering investigation of "corporations and other entities" who disagree with them. Their targets’ crime—dissenting from the party line on climate change. 

The suit was filed when George Mason University (GMU) falsely claimed that no such records existed in response to a VFOIA request...

Judges don’t like it when someone makes a claim that turns out not to be true in order to get a lawsuit dismissed, such as by claiming records don’t exist when they do. The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) failed to disclose the existence of some records in response to a Freedom of Information Act request until after a federal judge had already ruled in the case. When the judge found out, he issued an Order to Show Cause yesterday asking OSTP to explain why the Court should not impose sanctions on it, or permit discovery against it.

CEI had sought drafts of OSTP’s letter denying...