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Administrative Law Keyed to Asimow
Public Citizen v. Department of State
Citation:
276 F.3d 634 (2002)Facts
The State Department processes FOIA requests in four stages: acknowledgment, determination of which offices may have responsive documents, review of retrieved documents for exemptions, and release of non-exempt materials. The Department’s standard practice is to use the date of the FOIA request as a cut-off date, meaning it does not search for documents created after that date. In April 1998, Public Citizen submitted a FOIA request for records describing the Department’s system for managing electronic files. The Department waived its cut-off policy for this request. Public Citizen later submitted two additional requests in June and October 1998. For the June request, the Department indicated it would apply its usual cut-off policy. Public Citizen challenged the policy as procedurally invalid under the APA and substantively unreasonable under FOIA, while also contesting the Department’s withholding of certain information under FOIA’s national security exemption.
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