The Small Group A Pentagon spokesperson’s ordinary job is to manage how information reaches the public, not to decide what an intelligence office is allowed to investigate. A set of internal emails, released under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), the law that lets the public compel disclosure of federal records, shows Susan Gough doing … Read more
Two Filings, One Year Two sets of documents describe the same year from opposite directions. One set is public: comment letters filed with the Environmental Protection Agency, carrying the letterhead of trade associations, arguing that the agency’s Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program should not be repealed. The other set surfaced through a Freedom of Information Act … Read more
Two people asked the same Marine Corps office for records about the same ship, and they got two different answers, weeks apart, in 2022. One was told there was nothing to find. The other was handed a redacted slide deck. Both files are now public. Neither one explains why the office answered the way it … Read more
Two versions of the same year Roy Sawh wrote down what he wanted to say, then went out to Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park and, according to the men watching him, said something else. Both versions survive, filed together, at The National Archives. The reference is CRIM 1/4777, part of the Central Criminal Court’s records, … Read more
A Question With a Yes or No Answer Some Freedom of Information requests ask for a document. Request CAS-318518, filed with The National Archives at Kew, asked something narrower: a yes or no. Had any part of the parchment roll catalogued as C 53/102 ever been cut, trimmed, or excised? Did any conservation record or … Read more
The Black Vault filed a Freedom of Information Act request in January 2022 seeking the email traffic of Navy program manager Yasir Qureshi, whose name runs through records of the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF) under directors Jay Stratton and later Brennan McKernan. The task force had existed since August 4, 2020, set up … Read more
The Record on the Eve of a Handshake A single appearance can do more diplomatic work than a formal statement. In the days before the first meeting between the leaders of North and South Korea, American diplomats in Seoul were tracking exactly that: how a few relaxed minutes of Kim Jong Il standing beside Chinese … Read more
A Document, Not an Investigation The National Security Archive at George Washington University posted a briefing book on June 5, 2023, titled “The First Six Months of Clinton-Russian Relations: Summits with Yeltsin at Vancouver and Tokyo, 1993.” The material was declassified through mandatory declassification review, a process in which a requester asks the government to … Read more
Some files get released because a court order forces the issue. This one exists because a researcher asked for it, and the Air Force said yes. The paperwork The release is cataloged as FOIA case 2025-01757-F, filed under the Freedom of Information Act, the federal law requiring agencies to hand over records on request, subject … Read more
A meeting, on paper A Pentagon UAP investigator and a Harvard astrophysicist traded a run of emails in late 2022 that ended in a face-to-face meeting. That much is documented. What happened afterward is, for the most part, not. The document at the center of this is an email chain between Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, then … Read more