Opinion ID: 495212
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Law Enforcement Purposes

Text: 7 Until recently, exemption 7 required a threshold showing that the documents in question were investigatory records compiled for law enforcement purposes.... See 5 U.S.C. Sec. 552(b)(7) (1982). After the District Court entered judgment but prior to oral argument before us, the Freedom of Information Reform Act of 1986 broadened the scope of the exemption 7 threshold by replacing investigatory records with the more general term documents or information. Pub.L. No. 99-570, Sec. 1802(a) (Oct. 27, 1986) (to be codified at 5 U.S.C. Sec. 552(b)(7)); see id. Sec. 1804(a) (amendment applies to any civil action pending on Oct. 27, 1986). 8 On the requirement that survives the 1986 amendments (compiled for law enforcement purposes), the controlling precedent is Pratt v. Webster, 673 F.2d 408 (D.C.Cir.1982). Central to Pratt 's analysis was its conclusion that a criminal law enforcement agency['s] invocation of law enforcement purposes warrants greater deference than do like claims by other agencies. 673 F.2d at 418. Rooted in the proposition that government agencies typically go about their intended business, id. at 417-18, this view clearly survives the 1986 amendments. 9 In light of that deference, Pratt requires simply that the nexus between the agency's activity (under the old scheme, an investigation) and its law enforcement duties must be based on information sufficient to support at least 'a colorable claim' of its rationality. Id. at 421 (emphasis omitted). An objective finding of such a nexus is refutable only by persuasive evidence that in fact another, nonqualifying reason prompted the investigation. Shaw v. FBI, 749 F.2d 58, 63 (D.C.Cir.1984). As the validity of this test does not depend in the slightest upon whether the agency activity in question is an investigation or a compilation, it too remains unaltered by the 1986 amendments. 10 Application of Pratt 's nexus test to this case is straightforward. The parties have conveniently sorted the documents at issue into three roughly chronological categories, based upon the government's purported motive for their compilation. 11 Between 1941 and 1945, a government affidavit avers, two directives prompted the creation and compilation of Adamic's file. J.A. at 142. Most of the information on Adamic was gathered pursuant to a 1939 presidential directive that the FBI gather information relating to espionage, counterespionage, sabotage, subversive activities and violations of neutrality laws. Id. All documents gathered pursuant to that directive were characterized as Security Matter, id. at 23, and filed under classification 100, which corresponds to the label Internal Security, id. 12 The only document inserted into Adamic's file in the first period that does not appear clearly to have been prompted by the presidential directive is a 10-page memorandum, dated December 1, 1941, created in response to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's scrawled query, What do we know about Adamic? Id. at 143. The memo compiles references to Adamic in other files. According to the government affidavit: 13 Most of the information [deleted from that memorandum] was from treason investigations.... One reference was from another file in the 100 [Internal Security] classification and one from a file in the 39 (Falsely Claiming Citizenship) classification [of the FBI's filing system]. 14 Id. 15 The government has satisfied its burden of demonstrating that it compiled the documents in this first category pursuant to an objectively reasonable law enforcement purpose. Concededly, Hoover's cryptic query bespoke no particular motive. But that is irrelevant. The bits of information withheld from the responding memorandum merely reiterated material that indisputably was compiled [in other documents] for law enforcement purposes. Accordingly, those bits fall within exemption 7's purview, regardless of the purpose of the document that compiles them. See FBI v. Abramson, 456 U.S. at 623-31, 102 S.Ct. at 2060-64. 16 As to the remainder (and bulk) of the information withheld in the first category, appellant does not dispute that the terms of the 1939 presidential directive (espionage, counterespionage, sabotage, subversive activities and violations of neutrality laws) could in some circumstance furnish an objectively reasonable motive to gather information in the name of national security or law enforcement. He disputes instead the reasonableness of the FBI's reliance on that directive to collect the information on Adamic. 17 Plaintiff's claim depends on a suggestion that documents nominally gathered pursuant to obviously qualifying law enforcement objectives were in reality not so. Plaintiff offers nothing to support such a suggestion, and what data we have supports the opposite. Practically every document in Adamic's file in the first category bears the telltale Internal Security--C label. Merely to stamp a document national security does not of course make that characterization reasonable. The label does, however, suggest that the document's preparer considered that characterization reasonable. Cf. Smith v. Nixon, 807 F.2d 197, 202 (D.C.Cir.1986). That so many FBI preparers reached the same conclusion bolsters the credibility of that judgment. And that they all reached the conclusion oblivious to its potential relevance in a lawsuit that would be brought over four decades later, based on a statute that would not be enacted for two decades, tends to negate any extraneous motive. 18 We need not rest entirely on the inferences drawn from contemporaneous characterizations of the documents. The material compiled in response to Hoover's inquiry alone furnished sufficient reason to collect further information on Adamic in the name of law enforcement. Adamic's known affiliation with organizations that were strongly suspected of harboring Communists furnished a rational basis for continued collection of whatever information might turn up about his activities. See Lesar v. Department of Justice, 636 F.2d 472, 475-76, 486-87 (D.C.Cir.1980) (dictum) (FBI's initiation of investigation of Martin Luther King, Jr. to determine whether he or his affiliates were Communists was legitimate). Exemption 7's threshold requires no more. 19 The second category of documents corresponds roughly to the period between November 1945 (when Elizabeth Bentley accused Adamic of espionage) and September 1951 (when he died). According to the government affidavit, the inquiry focused primarily on Adamic's contact with the Nathan Gregory Silvermaster group, J.A. at 144, whose members were under investigation for espionage under 18 U.S.C. Secs. 792-797, and some of whose members were ultimately convicted. The rationality of a law enforcement purpose for collecting information on Adamic's activities could hardly be more colorable. Appellant practically concedes as much, attacking only (and only halfheartedly) the investigation's duration. Reply Brief for Appellant at 17 n. 31; see also Brief for Appellant at 28. We can imagine circumstances in which an activity, rationally related to a law enforcement purpose at the outset, might run astray, see Lesar, 636 F.2d at 475-76, 487 (dictum), or with the passage of time lose its rationality, cf. Halperin v. Kissinger, 807 F.2d 180, 191 (D.C.Cir.1986). This is not one of them. 3 20 The third category, gathered from Adamic's death in September 1951 until 1959, comprises FBI collections of copies of local police reports on the ensuing murder investigation and other miscellaneous information regarding possible foreign involvement in Adamic's death. Of course, the local police reports themselves are records or information compiled for law enforcement purposes. As such, those reports fall squarely within the language of the exemption 7 threshold regardless of the FBI's motive in collecting them, see Bevis v. Department of State, 801 F.2d 1386, 1388 (D.C.Cir.1986) (information gathered to aid law enforcement by foreign nations qualifies), as does any FBI summary of their contents, see Abramson, 456 U.S. at 623-32, 102 S.Ct. at 2060-640. Thus, we need only seek a qualifying FBI purpose for the information that it independently compiled. 21 Appellant's sole argument is that no such purpose would have been reasonable because Adamic's death implicated at most ... state laws. Brief for Appellant at 27 n. 70. That is both false and irrelevant. The Adamic case was not an ordinary murder investigation. Appellant, who seems to be among those who still believe that Adamic may have been assassinated, perhaps by foreign operatives, does not deny that the FBI could reasonably have acted on a like hunch. That suspicion alone would have justified probing the incident for leads to possible violations of any one of several federal laws, see, e.g., 18 U.S.C. Sec. 2382 (1982) (treason); id. Sec. 2383 (rebellion or insurrection); id. Sec. 2384 (seditious conspiracy); see also Pub.L. No. 81-831, Secs. 101-116, 64 Stat. 1019-30 (repealed 1971) (previously codified at 50 U.S.C. Secs. 811-826) (emergency detention of suspected security risks), that were then in existence. See Shaw, 749 F.2d at 63. 22 There is, at any rate, no requirement under exemption 7 that any violation of federal law be implicated, so long as the information is compiled for a federally authorized [law enforcement] purpose. Bevis, 801 F.2d at 1388 (emphasis added) (citation and internal quotes omitted); see Shaw, 749 F.2d at 64. As this court recently concluded, it is clear that investigation of the assassination of a prominent political figure (there, Martin Luther King, Jr.) connotes such a purpose. Weisberg v. Department of Justice, 745 F.2d 1476, 1491 (D.C.Cir.1984). See also Bevis, 801 F.2d at 1388 (federal law enforcement purpose supported in part by strong U.S. public policy interest in facilitating Salvadoran efforts to bring to justice those who have murdered U.S. citizens); Shaw, 749 F.2d at 64 (finding federal law enforcement purpose in collaboration with [state] authorities ... looking to the early apprehension ... and conviction of President Kennedy's assassin); Weisberg v. Department of Justice, 489 F.2d 1195, 1200-01 & n. 12 (D.C.Cir.1973) (en banc) (same), cert. denied, 416 U.S. 933, 94 S.Ct. 2405, 40 L.Ed.2d 772 (1974). 4 23 Appellant has suggested no reason to suspect the government's colorable claim of a rational law enforcement purpose with respect to any of the three classes of documents. He is, a fortiori, far from adducing persuasive evidence of some nonqualifying purpose. Shaw, 749 F.2d at 63. The government has sustained its burden of demonstrating a law enforcement purpose behind the compilation of all the information in question.