Government Accountability
MFIA frequently represents clients seeking access to information that will improve public understanding of government operations, including law enforcement activities, that promote affirmative disclosure practices, or that enforce procedures intended to speed the release of information. Our current cases include:
Behar v. DHS (SS Visitor Logs)
The Clinic represents award-winning investigative journalist Richard Behar in a FOIA lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security and the Secret Service, seeking records cataloguing visitors to Donald Trump and high-level campaign officials during the campaign and transition periods.
New York Times v. Treasury Department
The Clinic has sued the Treasury Department over its refusal to grant a FOIA request seeking several officials’ email communications likely to shed light on the extent to which lobbyists and others may be influencing agency decision-making. The Clinic drafted and filed a complaint and is currently overseeing the production of documents.
Ryan Scoville v. State Department
The Clinic is representing Prof. Ryan Scoville of Marquette University Law School in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit that challenges the State Department’s chronically slow responses to FOIA requests.
The Clinic represents the New York Times and legal historians Lee Levine and Stephen Wermeil in a FOIA action to understand the extent to which the FBI targeted the New York Times and its reporters as part of its now-discredited COINTELPRO program in the 1960s and 1970s.
The Clinic represents Jonathan Kaplan, a whistleblower and former official in the CIA’s Office of Inspector General. Kaplan blew the whistle on misconduct of high-ranking officials within the CIA OIG (including a former Inspector General) for actions such as retaliation against other whistleblowers. He then suffered various adverse personnel actions, and filed a whistleblower reprisal complaint.
MFIA represents Dr. Caleb Alexander, a professor at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health and an expert on drug safety, seeking to shed light on how the FDA regulates these drugs and how its regulatory practices could be improved.
For a list of previous matters, please see the MFIA Archive.