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 today’s episode, 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
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.
That's my colleague, Jason Leopold.
I feel it's my job to try and get as much information out of the government as possible.
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 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 right now.
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.
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 Freedom of Information Act. He says he does this all to show.
People 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.
Today 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? This is the Big Take Podcast. I'm Salaiah Mosen. Jason Leopold is not just any investigative reporter. He's a champion of requesting records using the Freedom of Information Act.
FOYA for sure, I 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.
I believe his persistent prop of the US government has even earned him a special nickname that he includes in his bio on X.
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 in an email that I was a member of a Foya posse and perhaps that should be my 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.
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?
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.
Can I get the President's text messages? 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 its tax dollars are being spent.
But there's limitations, and FOYA hasn't been around that long. How was it that the Freedom of Information Act came about?
Lyndon Johnson signed it into law back in the late sixties, and it was basically 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 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.
And what's behind your keen interest or even obsession behind foyeang.
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 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.
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.
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 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 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 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.
And how do you actually file the request?
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, 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 you get anything back.
Once you get the record, is it just easy from there. It's all written there, easy for you to read and figure out.
No, no, no, no no, that's where the fun begins.
Coming up, Jason gets some mail and the fun begins. I'm talking with Foya fiend Jason Leopold about what comes next when he receives information back from the government.
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.
On here, and so yeah, I see black marks all over it.
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.
Jason, what's the biggest story that you've broken but the world didn't know about the world needed to know about and it was the Foyer request from you that brought that into the public domain.
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 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 heavily involved in the production of Zero Dark thirty, the movie. They were invited in to CIA to basically tell the CIA's 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 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 biggest story I got out a 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.
Why is it the governments make it so hard? You talk about how you've had to sue governments for information you've waited for a year. I just saw a tweet of yours from a couple of days ago, So 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?
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 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 requests. 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 know exactly what I want.
Yeah, you're giving them a lot of clues. Jason even newsletter now where you share the latests that you've gotten from all your Foyer requests, Can you tell me why people should care about the work that you do.
I am informing you about what takes place behind the scenes at federal government agencies and how your tax payer dollars are being spent. These are issues and subjects that you didn't even know existed, and it can really provide you with amazing detail on how the sausage is made.
Thanks for listening to The Big Take podcast from Bloomberg News. I'm Salia Mosen. Jason Leopold's newsletter, Foya 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 Adrianna Tapia. It was edited by Aaron Edwards. Naomi Shaven is our senior producer. Wendy Benjaminson and Elizabeth Ponso provide editorial direction. Nicole Beamster Bower is our executive producer. Sage Bauman is Bloomberg's head of podcasts. Thanks for listening, we'll be back next week.