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The Courier-Journal in Louisville first asked LMPD in mid-2019 for all records regarding the two officers’ sexual abuse of minors. Louisville claimed it didn’t have any; they had been turned over to the FBI. Then the Courier-Journal appealed, and the city eventually determined that — well, what do you know — they’d found a “hidden folder” still containing the responsive records — 738,000 of them, actually. Not for long, though. Less than a month later, they’d all been deleted, despite the ongoing request, a casualty of the city’s automated backup and deletion system, according to Louisville.

At the end of 2020, the Courier-Journal was still fighting the city’s failure to comply with the Kentucky Open Records Act.

“I have practiced open records law since the law was enacted 45 years ago, and I have never seen anything so brazen,” Courier-Journal attorney Jon Fleischaker told the paper. “I think it an outrage.”

The Eric Cartman Respect My Authoritah Award: Haskell Indian Nations University, Kansas

When Jared Nally, editor-in-chief of The Indian Leader, the student newspaper at Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence, Kansas, started putting questions to his school’s administration and sending records requests to the local police department, he got a lot more than he expected: A directive from his school’s president demanding he cease his requests in the name of the student paper and henceforth treat officials with proper respect, lest he face disciplinary action.

“Your behavior has discredited you and this university,” Haskell Indian Nations University President Ronald Graham wrote. “You have compromised your credibility within the community and, more importantly, you have brought yourself, The Indian Leader, Haskell, and me unwarranted attention.”

Graham’s aggressive tactics against the college junior quickly rallied support for the student journalist, with the Native American Journalists Association, Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, and Student Press Law Center all calling for the formal directive to be rescinded. The school ultimately did back down, but the efforts left Nally shocked.

“As a student journalist, I’d only been doing it for a year,” he told Poynter in an interview. “When somebody in authority says things like that about you, it really does take a hit. … I’d say I’m recovering from the gaslighting effects, and feeling like what I’m doing really is every bit a part of journalism.”

The Power of the Tweet Award: Donald J. Trump

exempt from disclosure—resides with and is largely at the discretion of the president, who can then designate that authority as needed to agency personnel. So one expected upside of a looselipped president with an undisciplined social media habit was the ability to use the Tweeter-in-Chief’s posts to target otherwise inaccessible FOIA requests.

Case in point: Trump’s Oct. 7, 2020, tweet: “I have fully authorized the total Declassification of any & all documents pertaining to the single greatest political CRIME in American History, the Russia Hoax. Likewise, the Hillary Clinton Email Scandal. No redactions!” Hard to argue there’s ambiguity there. But when BuzzFeed News’ Jason Leopold flagged that order in his ongoing lawsuit for the materials, that’s exactly what the Department of Justice did. Based on their investigations, DOJ lawyers told the court, the posts “were not self-executing declassification orders and do not require the declassification of any particular documents.”

The court ultimately bought the argument that you can’t take what the then-president tweets too seriously, but Trump declassified other materials related to the FBI’s investigation... on his last day in office.

"No redactions?!" He's not serious, folks. There will be redactions.

The 30 Days of Night Award: Hamilton County, Tennessee

It’s hard to imagine a more benign request than asking for copies of other public records requests, but that’s exactly what got Hamilton County officials in Tennessee so spooked they started a mass purge of documents. The shred-a-thon started after Chattanooga Times Free Press reporter Sarah Grace Taylor requested to examine the requests to see if the county’s policies for releasing materials were arbitrary. Originally, the county asked for $717 for about 1,500 pages of records, which Taylor declined to pay in favor of inspecting the records herself.

But as negotiations to view the records commenced, records coordinator Dana Beltramo requested and received permission to update their retention policy to just 30 days for records requests. After Taylor’s continued reporting on the issue sparked an outcry, the county revised its policy once again and promised to do better.

“What we did today was basically try to prevent the confusion of mistakes that have happened from happening again,” said Hamilton County mayor Jim Coppinger. In other words, it’s all just a big misunderstanding.

The Handcuffs and Prior Restraints Award: Chicago Police Department and City of Chicago, Illinois

In February 2019, a swarm of Chicago police officers raided the wrong apartment with their guns drawn. They handcuffed the resident, Anjanette Young, who was completely undressed, and they refused to let her put on clothes as she pleaded with them dozens of times that they had the wrong house. Young sued the city in federal court and filed a request for body camera footage of the officers who invaded her home. The local CBS affiliate, CBS 2, also requested the body camera footage.

The Chicago Police Department denied both requests, despite a binding ruling just months earlier that CPD was required to turn over body camera footage to people like Young who were involved in the recorded events. Young ultimately got the footage as part of her lawsuit, and her attorney provided them to the media. The city’s lawyers then took the extraordinary step of asking the court to order CBS 2 not to air the video, a demand to censor speech before it occurs called a “prior restraint.” The judge denied the city’s request.

The city also sought sanctions against Young’s attorney, but the city withdrew its motion and Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot called the request “ill-advised” in a letter to the court. The judge decided not to sanction Young’s attorney.

The Thin Crust, Wood-Fired Redactions Award: U.S. State Department

Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo hosted plenty of controversial meals during his three-year tenure. There was the indoor holiday party last December and those bizarre, lavish “Madison Dinners” that cost taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars, including more than $10k for embossed pens alone. And while we know the full menu of Pompeo’s high-class North Korea summit in 2018 in Manhattan—filet mignon with corn purée was the centerpiece—the public may never find out two searing culinary questions about Mikey: What are his pizza toppings of choice, and what’s his go-to sandwich?

On the pizza angle, the State Department let slip that Pompeo likes it thin and wood-fired, in emails released to NBC correspondent Josh Lederman. But the list of toppings was far too saucy for public consumption, apparently, and redacted on privacy grounds. Same for Pompeo’s sandwich of choice, which the State Department redacted from emails released to American Oversight. But we still know “plenty of dry snacks and Diet Coke” were on offer.

The Self-Serving Secrecy Award: Niagara County, New York

Money talks. The New York legislature knew this when it passed the Ethics in Government Act in 1987, which required, among other public transparency measures, elected officials in 50,000 person-plus municipalities to complete financial disclosure forms each year. The public should be allowed to see who our leaders may be particularly keen to hear.

Sixty-one of NY’s 62 counties generally accepted that the disclosure forms, created for public use in the first place, were meant to be disclosed, according to the New York Coalition for Open Government. Back in 1996, though, while everyone was presumably distracted watching the Yankees or “Independence Day,” Niagara County found a quick trick to keep from sharing its officials’ finances: they made it illegal. By local ordinance, the records were made secret, and the county proceeded to reject any requests for access by claiming that releasing the information would be a violation of the law.

This local law prohibiting access was itself, of course, a violation of the law, but Niagara County managed to keep it on the books for more than two decades, and it may have gotten away with it had it not been for the work of the NY Coalition for Open Government.

In February 2020, the NYCOG, represented by the University at Buffalo School of Law Civil Rights & Transparency Clinic, sued Niagara County, alleging its ordinance was unlawful (because it was). This past fall, a court agreed. Five months later, in January 2021, the county began releasing records, ones that should have been available for the last 30+ years.

The Foilies were compiled by Electronic Frontier Foundation Director of Investigations Dave Maass, Senior Staff Attorney Aaron Mackey, and Frank Stanton Fellow Naomi Gilens, and MuckRock News Co-Founder Michael Morisy and Senior Reporter and Projects Editor Beryl Lipton, with further writing and editing by Shawn Musgrave. Illustrations are by EFF Designer Caitlyn Crites.