FOIA Documents ‘Scrubbed’ From Intelligence Agency Website ⇥ bloomberg.com

A strange thing happened last May: the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s FOIA page, which had previously contained a generous list of released documents, was censored. When I asked the agency what was up with that, they told me the site was “currently under construction in order to enhance and streamline the user experience”, with “temporary downtime of certain pages and content”. It turns out that was nonsense, hence my use of “censored” above.

Jason Leopold, in his “FOIA Files” newsletter at Bloomberg:

But an ODNI official told FOIA Files that the removal of the FOIA page was not connected to the Tren de Aragua intelligence assessment released to Harper. Instead, the website overhaul was prompted after another agency flagged a document released during the Biden administration that the official claimed had been improperly posted to ODNI’s FOIA reading room. (The official would not describe the document or say if it was retroactively classified.)

The emails I obtained, which have been partially redacted, reference a “document,” the title of which was blacked out, that sparked ODNI’s aggressive response.

If there was a single erroneously released document, it surely would not necessitate the removal of so many documents. One of the few ones remaining in the reading room is, oddly enough, the partially redacted email exchange (PDF) released to Leopold in which Madeline Meeker asks for the page to be “completely scrubbed”. No request logs have been posted since January 2025 under the “most transparent administration in history”.