April 25, 2024 • 14 mins
The US public’s trust in the media, and the government, is markedly low. A recent Gallup poll found only about 30 percent of Americans trust the media — and Pew Research found only 16 percent trust their government.
Bloomberg’s Jason Leopold is using records to try to change that. He’s filed over 9,000 requests through the Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA — a Cold War era law meant to ensure the right to transparency from the US government.
On this week’s Big Take DC, host Saleha Mohsin and Jason dissect the FOIA process, the challenges of sifting through redacted documents from secretive government entities and the stories FOIA records have brought to light.
Subscribe to the FOIA Files newsletter: https://www.bloomberg.com/account/newsletters/foia-files
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news. Government agencies are so
unbelievably secret. If you know this right, I mean, they
don't want to relinquish any information.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
That's my colleague, Jason Leopold.
Speaker 1 (00:19):
I feel it's my job to try and get as
much information out of the government as possible.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Secrecy seems to go hand in hand with American policy
and politics. That's nothing new. Think back to the Watergate scandal,
when journalists revealed that President Nixon had tried to cover
up a plot to steal top secret documents from the
Democratic National Committee. But so much has changed since Watergate.
When Nixon left office, Pew Research found that only thirty
(00:47):
six percent of Americans trusted their government. At the time,
it was a record low. Now that number is down
to sixteen percent. As for journalists who held nixonto account,
Americans don't trust them either. According to a Gallup poll,
back in Nixon's day, almost seventy percent of Americans said
they trusted the media. Today that's hovering around thirty percent
(01:11):
right now.
Speaker 1 (01:11):
The public has such a low opinion of journalists and journalism,
and I feel that documents and getting the receipts, so
to speak, is a great way to show our work
and to bring readers into the reporting process.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
So Jason has made it his mission to claw as
many documents as he can from the US government's hands.
Between twenty one and twenty twenty, he sued the US
government for information more times than any other individual in
the country. The only entity that has him beat the
New York Times Company and Jason's weapon of choice, the
(01:51):
Freedom of Information Act. He says he does this all
to show people.
Speaker 1 (01:56):
Here you can read the document for yourself. It just
helps win that trust from readers. But in addition to that,
I mean, I have to say that I really do
enjoy the battle.
Speaker 2 (02:11):
This week, we go inside that battle for transparency with
Bloomberg investigative reporter Jason Leopold. How did a Cold War
era law ensure the right to transparency from the US
government and how are journalists like Jason using that today
to hold it accountable? From Bloomberg's Washington Bureau, This is
the Big Take DC Podcast. I'm Salaiah Mosen. Jason Leopold
(02:40):
is not just any investigative reporter. He's a champion of
requesting records using the Freedom of Information Act FOYA for sure, I.
Speaker 1 (02:48):
Have filed more than nine thousand Foyer requests, and that's
on the state and federal level, and I have sued
the government more than one hundred and fifty times.
Speaker 2 (03:02):
I believe his persistent probing of the US government has
even earned him a special nickname that he includes in
his bio on X.
Speaker 1 (03:09):
When I was filing one request, I had heard within
the FBI that they had referred to me as a
FOYA terrorist. Since then, the National Security Agency has said
that I have weaponized the FOYA. The Department of Justice
said it in an email that I was a member
of a Foya posse and perhaps that should be my
(03:30):
band name. Not too bad of a band name, maybe,
And I found out through a Foyer request on myself
that the FBI sent an agent out to investigate one
of my Foyer requests.
Speaker 2 (03:47):
Jason, you and I are both reporters, and so to
talk about such a nerdy topic as investigative journalism and
foya's is super fun at least for me, but for
the everyday person. Can you explain what is the Freedom
of Information Act?
Speaker 1 (04:03):
The Freedom of Information Act is a half century old
law that allows anyone anywhere in the world to request
all sorts of records from the federal government. You can
ask for emails, you can ask for text messages, you
can ask for photographs, you can ask for audio files.
Speaker 2 (04:21):
Can I get the President's text messages?
Speaker 1 (04:24):
No? So when the Freedom of Information Act was passed
and signed into law, Congress exempted themselves from the Freedom
of Information Act, and then the White House was exempt
as well. So this law exists to essentially keep the
public informed about what its government is up to, how
(04:45):
its tax dollars are being spent. But there's limitations and.
Speaker 2 (04:49):
FOYA hasn't been around that long. How was it that
the Freedom of Information Act came about?
Speaker 1 (04:55):
Lyndon Johnson signed it into law back in the late sixties,
and it was based supposed to be a check on power.
There were many different lawmakers who felt that government agencies
were just being far too secretive. There was the FBI
surveilling various anti war groups the Cold War, and a
(05:17):
lot that the government was doing at the time that
was being revealed through various Senate hearings, and so this
was something to offer up the public to keep them
informed about what the government was up to.
Speaker 2 (05:33):
And what's behind your keen interest or even obsession behind Foyeang.
Speaker 1 (05:38):
I'd spent years as a national security reporter, so I
was covering CIA and all the intelligence agencies, and everything
in that world is secret. It's either classified top secret
or at even a higher classification level. So any kind
of information that I would obtain from sources would always
(05:59):
be attributed to an anonymous source. And I just feel
right now that it's crucial for us as reporters to
provide the public with as much documentary evidence as we
can obtain when we're reporting our stories, and to back
up what we're reporting.
Speaker 2 (06:18):
You say you'll enjoy the battle. Tell me about your
process and what this battle is. Let's say you want
to look into something, pick a topic, and take me
from A to Z on it.
Speaker 1 (06:28):
Sure, I don't just fire off requests. What I do
is I conduct a extensive amount of research into the
topic I'm covering. I'll try to source up either at
the agency's Freedom of Information Act office or people who
work at the agency and ask them what kinds of
(06:50):
documents are there, what's the date on a document, what's
this subject line? Where would these records be stored? All
of that information you need to go into a freedom
of Information Act request. It has to be kind of
a blueprint that will instruct an agency FOYA officer on
(07:11):
exactly where to go to look for records. So, for example,
when Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank failed last year
and we saw regulators quickly moving to take action as
a result of that, I wanted to obtain documents about
(07:32):
what took place behind the scenes at the FDIIC, the
Federal Reserve, the Treasury Department and find out what was happening,
what led up to this, what were these officials discussing
prior to the failure of the banks, Where there any
bank officials that were communicating with regulators.
Speaker 2 (07:53):
And how do you actually file the request?
Speaker 1 (07:55):
Believe it or not, there are still some agencies that
accept faxes. You can fax a request to the agency.
The CIA is kind of notorious for that. You can
put a stamp on an envelope and mail it, or
you can email it. Increasingly, agencies are using secure portals
online where you could submit your request there and by law,
(08:20):
they have to respond to your request in twenty calendar days.
That means they've acknowledged your request. Maybe if you're a journalist,
they've granted you a fee waiver, and then some time
passes and you get records. You know, consider this a footnote.
If you try to file a request with any of
the intelligence agencies, it will take years and years before
(08:41):
you get anything back.
Speaker 2 (08:42):
Once you get the record, is it just easy from there?
It's all written there, easy for you to read and
figure out.
Speaker 1 (08:47):
No, no, no, no no, that's where the fun begins.
Speaker 2 (08:52):
Coming up, Jason gets some mail and the fun begins.
I'm talking with Foye fiend Jason Leopold about what comes
next when he receives information back from the government.
Speaker 1 (09:12):
There's a lot of work. Oftentimes records will be redacted
and they will contain just as an example, you know,
I'm looking at a record right now from the Office
of the Director of National Intelligence. It's an email partially redacted.
Speaker 2 (09:30):
On here, and so yeah, I see black marks all
over it.
Speaker 1 (09:34):
Yeah. So these reactions refer to names. So that means
that I have to now sleuth out, to the best
of my ability, what's under those reactions. So I read
these documents very carefully because even though they're redacted, there's
still lots of good information that you can glean from documents.
Speaker 2 (09:55):
Jason, what's the biggest story that you've broken, but the
world didn't know about. The the world needed to know about,
and it was the Fourer request from you that brought
that into the public domain.
Speaker 1 (10:06):
There's a number of different ones, and I'm going to
use some of the records that I obtained from the
CIA as an example. So, as I mentioned, I spent
many years covering national security, and I had been investigating
the CIA's enhanced interrogation program, the torture program that they
(10:27):
implemented when they captured high value detainees after nine to eleven.
I was able to completely lay bare the money that
was spent on the contractors to stand up a portion
of that program. Also, one of the big document scores
that I got from that was how the CIA was
(10:49):
heavily involved in the production of Zero Dark thirty, the movie.
They were invited in to CIA to basically tell the
CIA narrative about the immediate aftermath of nine to eleven
and what happened at one of its black sites. They
allowed the CIA to read scripts and to make notes
(11:12):
on the scripts. And it also showed that they had
showered these CIA officers with gifts Prada and Pearl earrings
and dinners, and that was a pretty big story at
the time. To be clear, zero Dark thirty and the
CIA's role in it, I wouldn't equate that to the
(11:35):
biggest story I got out of FOYA, but it was
sort of the body of work around the CIA's post
nine to eleven interrogation program, and there were about twelve
or thirteen stories within that body of work that all
relied on documents.
Speaker 2 (11:56):
Why is it the governments make it so hard? You
talk about how you've had to sue governments from information
you've waited for a year. I just saw a tweet
of yours from a couple of days ago that says
that a for your request you'd filed a decade ago,
you just got the response on that. Why is it
so hard?
Speaker 1 (12:11):
Such a great question. I wish I had a better
answer than they just don't want the public to know.
You know, the government agencies will say they don't have
enough staff to process these requests. They have an enormous
backlog of requests that they're dealing with. The federal government
just reported last year that they received more than a
(12:34):
million Freedom of Information at requests, more than any other
year that they've been tracking this. But they haven't increased
the number of people that they need at these various
agencies to process the request. They haven't added any money
to the budget to hire additional people to get additional resources.
That's why when I'm filing requests for certain records, I
(12:57):
know exactly what I want.
Speaker 2 (12:59):
Yeah, you're giving them a lot of clues. Jason, even
newsletter now where you share the latest records that you've
gotten from all your Foyer requests. Can you tell me
why people should care about the work that you do.
Speaker 1 (13:12):
I am informing you about what takes place behind the
scenes at federal government agencies and how your taxpayer dollars
are being spent. These are issues and subjects that you
didn't even know existed, and it can really provide you
(13:34):
with amazing detail on how the sausage is made.
Speaker 2 (13:42):
Thanks for listening to The Big Take DC podcast from
Bloomberg News. I'm Salia Mosen. Jason Leopold's newsletter, Foyer Files,
comes out every Friday. You can subscribe at bloomberg dot
com slash Newsletters. This episode was produced by Julia Press.
It was mixed by Ben O'Brien and fact checked by
Audreyanna Tapia. It was edited by Aaron Edwards. Naomi Shaven
(14:05):
is our senior producer. Wendy Benjaminson and Elizabeth Ponso provide
editorial direction. Nicole Beemster Bower is our executive producer. Sage
Bauman is Bloomberg's head of podcasts. Please subscribe and review
The Big Take DC wherever you listen to podcasts. It
helps new listeners find the show. Thanks for listening. We'll
be back next week.
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news. Government agencies are so
unbelievably secret. If you know this right, I mean, they
don't want to relinquish any information.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
That's my colleague, Jason Leopold.
Speaker 1 (00:19):
I feel it's my job to try and get as
much information out of the government as possible.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Secrecy seems to go hand in hand with American policy
and politics. That's nothing new. Think back to the Watergate scandal,
when journalists revealed that President Nixon had tried to cover
up a plot to steal top secret documents from the
Democratic National Committee. But so much has changed since Watergate.
When Nixon left office, Pew Research found that only thirty
(00:47):
six percent of Americans trusted their government. At the time,
it was a record low. Now that number is down
to sixteen percent. As for journalists who held nixonto account,
Americans don't trust them either. According to a Gallup poll,
back in Nixon's day, almost seventy percent of Americans said
they trusted the media. Today that's hovering around thirty percent
(01:11):
right now.
Speaker 1 (01:11):
The public has such a low opinion of journalists and journalism,
and I feel that documents and getting the receipts, so
to speak, is a great way to show our work
and to bring readers into the reporting process.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
So Jason has made it his mission to claw as
many documents as he can from the US government's hands.
Between twenty one and twenty twenty, he sued the US
government for information more times than any other individual in
the country. The only entity that has him beat the
New York Times Company and Jason's weapon of choice, the
(01:51):
Freedom of Information Act. He says he does this all
to show people.
Speaker 1 (01:56):
Here you can read the document for yourself. It just
helps win that trust from readers. But in addition to that,
I mean, I have to say that I really do
enjoy the battle.
Speaker 2 (02:11):
This week, we go inside that battle for transparency with
Bloomberg investigative reporter Jason Leopold. How did a Cold War
era law ensure the right to transparency from the US
government and how are journalists like Jason using that today
to hold it accountable? From Bloomberg's Washington Bureau, This is
the Big Take DC Podcast. I'm Salaiah Mosen. Jason Leopold
(02:40):
is not just any investigative reporter. He's a champion of
requesting records using the Freedom of Information Act FOYA for sure, I.
Speaker 1 (02:48):
Have filed more than nine thousand Foyer requests, and that's
on the state and federal level, and I have sued
the government more than one hundred and fifty times.
Speaker 2 (03:02):
I believe his persistent probing of the US government has
even earned him a special nickname that he includes in
his bio on X.
Speaker 1 (03:09):
When I was filing one request, I had heard within
the FBI that they had referred to me as a
FOYA terrorist. Since then, the National Security Agency has said
that I have weaponized the FOYA. The Department of Justice
said it in an email that I was a member
of a Foya posse and perhaps that should be my
(03:30):
band name. Not too bad of a band name, maybe,
And I found out through a Foyer request on myself
that the FBI sent an agent out to investigate one
of my Foyer requests.
Speaker 2 (03:47):
Jason, you and I are both reporters, and so to
talk about such a nerdy topic as investigative journalism and
foya's is super fun at least for me, but for
the everyday person. Can you explain what is the Freedom
of Information Act?
Speaker 1 (04:03):
The Freedom of Information Act is a half century old
law that allows anyone anywhere in the world to request
all sorts of records from the federal government. You can
ask for emails, you can ask for text messages, you
can ask for photographs, you can ask for audio files.
Speaker 2 (04:21):
Can I get the President's text messages?
Speaker 1 (04:24):
No? So when the Freedom of Information Act was passed
and signed into law, Congress exempted themselves from the Freedom
of Information Act, and then the White House was exempt
as well. So this law exists to essentially keep the
public informed about what its government is up to, how
(04:45):
its tax dollars are being spent. But there's limitations and.
Speaker 2 (04:49):
FOYA hasn't been around that long. How was it that
the Freedom of Information Act came about?
Speaker 1 (04:55):
Lyndon Johnson signed it into law back in the late sixties,
and it was based supposed to be a check on power.
There were many different lawmakers who felt that government agencies
were just being far too secretive. There was the FBI
surveilling various anti war groups the Cold War, and a
(05:17):
lot that the government was doing at the time that
was being revealed through various Senate hearings, and so this
was something to offer up the public to keep them
informed about what the government was up to.
Speaker 2 (05:33):
And what's behind your keen interest or even obsession behind Foyeang.
Speaker 1 (05:38):
I'd spent years as a national security reporter, so I
was covering CIA and all the intelligence agencies, and everything
in that world is secret. It's either classified top secret
or at even a higher classification level. So any kind
of information that I would obtain from sources would always
(05:59):
be attributed to an anonymous source. And I just feel
right now that it's crucial for us as reporters to
provide the public with as much documentary evidence as we
can obtain when we're reporting our stories, and to back
up what we're reporting.
Speaker 2 (06:18):
You say you'll enjoy the battle. Tell me about your
process and what this battle is. Let's say you want
to look into something, pick a topic, and take me
from A to Z on it.
Speaker 1 (06:28):
Sure, I don't just fire off requests. What I do
is I conduct a extensive amount of research into the
topic I'm covering. I'll try to source up either at
the agency's Freedom of Information Act office or people who
work at the agency and ask them what kinds of
(06:50):
documents are there, what's the date on a document, what's
this subject line? Where would these records be stored? All
of that information you need to go into a freedom
of Information Act request. It has to be kind of
a blueprint that will instruct an agency FOYA officer on
(07:11):
exactly where to go to look for records. So, for example,
when Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank failed last year
and we saw regulators quickly moving to take action as
a result of that, I wanted to obtain documents about
(07:32):
what took place behind the scenes at the FDIIC, the
Federal Reserve, the Treasury Department and find out what was happening,
what led up to this, what were these officials discussing
prior to the failure of the banks, Where there any
bank officials that were communicating with regulators.
Speaker 2 (07:53):
And how do you actually file the request?
Speaker 1 (07:55):
Believe it or not, there are still some agencies that
accept faxes. You can fax a request to the agency.
The CIA is kind of notorious for that. You can
put a stamp on an envelope and mail it, or
you can email it. Increasingly, agencies are using secure portals
online where you could submit your request there and by law,
(08:20):
they have to respond to your request in twenty calendar days.
That means they've acknowledged your request. Maybe if you're a journalist,
they've granted you a fee waiver, and then some time
passes and you get records. You know, consider this a footnote.
If you try to file a request with any of
the intelligence agencies, it will take years and years before
(08:41):
you get anything back.
Speaker 2 (08:42):
Once you get the record, is it just easy from there?
It's all written there, easy for you to read and
figure out.
Speaker 1 (08:47):
No, no, no, no no, that's where the fun begins.
Speaker 2 (08:52):
Coming up, Jason gets some mail and the fun begins.
I'm talking with Foye fiend Jason Leopold about what comes
next when he receives information back from the government.
Speaker 1 (09:12):
There's a lot of work. Oftentimes records will be redacted
and they will contain just as an example, you know,
I'm looking at a record right now from the Office
of the Director of National Intelligence. It's an email partially redacted.
Speaker 2 (09:30):
On here, and so yeah, I see black marks all
over it.
Speaker 1 (09:34):
Yeah. So these reactions refer to names. So that means
that I have to now sleuth out, to the best
of my ability, what's under those reactions. So I read
these documents very carefully because even though they're redacted, there's
still lots of good information that you can glean from documents.
Speaker 2 (09:55):
Jason, what's the biggest story that you've broken, but the
world didn't know about. The the world needed to know about,
and it was the Fourer request from you that brought
that into the public domain.
Speaker 1 (10:06):
There's a number of different ones, and I'm going to
use some of the records that I obtained from the
CIA as an example. So, as I mentioned, I spent
many years covering national security, and I had been investigating
the CIA's enhanced interrogation program, the torture program that they
(10:27):
implemented when they captured high value detainees after nine to eleven.
I was able to completely lay bare the money that
was spent on the contractors to stand up a portion
of that program. Also, one of the big document scores
that I got from that was how the CIA was
(10:49):
heavily involved in the production of Zero Dark thirty, the movie.
They were invited in to CIA to basically tell the
CIA narrative about the immediate aftermath of nine to eleven
and what happened at one of its black sites. They
allowed the CIA to read scripts and to make notes
(11:12):
on the scripts. And it also showed that they had
showered these CIA officers with gifts Prada and Pearl earrings
and dinners, and that was a pretty big story at
the time. To be clear, zero Dark thirty and the
CIA's role in it, I wouldn't equate that to the
(11:35):
biggest story I got out of FOYA, but it was
sort of the body of work around the CIA's post
nine to eleven interrogation program, and there were about twelve
or thirteen stories within that body of work that all
relied on documents.
Speaker 2 (11:56):
Why is it the governments make it so hard? You
talk about how you've had to sue governments from information
you've waited for a year. I just saw a tweet
of yours from a couple of days ago that says
that a for your request you'd filed a decade ago,
you just got the response on that. Why is it
so hard?
Speaker 1 (12:11):
Such a great question. I wish I had a better
answer than they just don't want the public to know.
You know, the government agencies will say they don't have
enough staff to process these requests. They have an enormous
backlog of requests that they're dealing with. The federal government
just reported last year that they received more than a
(12:34):
million Freedom of Information at requests, more than any other
year that they've been tracking this. But they haven't increased
the number of people that they need at these various
agencies to process the request. They haven't added any money
to the budget to hire additional people to get additional resources.
That's why when I'm filing requests for certain records, I
(12:57):
know exactly what I want.
Speaker 2 (12:59):
Yeah, you're giving them a lot of clues. Jason, even
newsletter now where you share the latest records that you've
gotten from all your Foyer requests. Can you tell me
why people should care about the work that you do.
Speaker 1 (13:12):
I am informing you about what takes place behind the
scenes at federal government agencies and how your taxpayer dollars
are being spent. These are issues and subjects that you
didn't even know existed, and it can really provide you
(13:34):
with amazing detail on how the sausage is made.
Speaker 2 (13:42):
Thanks for listening to The Big Take DC podcast from
Bloomberg News. I'm Salia Mosen. Jason Leopold's newsletter, Foyer Files,
comes out every Friday. You can subscribe at bloomberg dot
com slash Newsletters. This episode was produced by Julia Press.
It was mixed by Ben O'Brien and fact checked by
Audreyanna Tapia. It was edited by Aaron Edwards. Naomi Shaven
(14:05):
is our senior producer. Wendy Benjaminson and Elizabeth Ponso provide
editorial direction. Nicole Beemster Bower is our executive producer. Sage
Bauman is Bloomberg's head of podcasts. Please subscribe and review
The Big Take DC wherever you listen to podcasts. It
helps new listeners find the show. Thanks for listening. We'll
be back next week.
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