WASHINGTON, DC – Last night, America First Legal (AFL) filed a lawsuit against the Biden Administration’s Department of Justice to require it to follow the law and process multiple Freedom of Information Act requests AFL filed in recent months: Afghanistan Vetting, Georgia Election integrity lawsuit, and the Oct. 4 Memo siccing the FBI on parents who are concerned about Critical Race Theory in schools.
In each case, AFL requested expedited processing of its FOIA requests. Each request related to Biden Administration actions that were extensively covered in the media, and some were the subject of substantial inquiries and oversight from Congress. And in each case, the Biden Administration denied AFL’s request for expedited processing. AFL appealed each decision, but the Biden DOJ denied them all.
AFL’s lawsuit challenges those denials, and further alleges that Biden political appointees within the DOJ are systemically stonewalling the disclosure of politically embarrassing information. In one example, DOJ denied virtually identical requests that the Departments of State, Homeland Security, and Defense granted to AFL. And in another, a Biden DOJ official claimed that the October 4 Memorandum issued by Attorney General Merrick Garland was not a matter of public interest that justified processing documents quickly.
Statement from America First Legal Vice President and General Counsel Gene Hamilton:
“The fact that the Biden Administration’s Department of Justice is engaged in a systematic campaign of undeniably politically-motivated lawsuits and prosecutions should be alarming to all Americans. But the fact that they are also using politically-driven decisionmaking to hide basic, but potentially politically-damaging, information from the American people raises the stakes to a new level. The Department of Justice has never been this politicized—which means that either the Attorney General has broken his promises to the American people, or he does not actually control the actions of his political appointees throughout the Department of Justice,” Gene Hamilton said.
Read the complaint here.
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