Opinion ID: 172367
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: FBI's Motion for Reconsideration and District Court's Revised Order

Text: The FBI moved for reconsideration of the district court's order. It claimed that (1) the redacted material in the Freeh Memorandum was exempt from disclosure because it would compromise the identity of and information provided by a confidential informant; (2) the BOMBROB-Funding Memorandum did not reference the SPLC and therefore was not responsive to Mr. Trentadue's initial FOIA request; and (3) the additional search ordered by the court would be unduly burdensome. In support of its motion, the FBI submitted a third declaration from David Hardy. Hardy stated that file number 174-OC-56120, one of the three files to be searched under the court's order, contained about 1,152,000 pages. He asserted that the manual search ordered by the court would be extremely time consuming and unprecedented in the history of the FBI FOIA Program. Id. at 204. (The agency's brief below estimated that such a manual search would require thousands of work hours to complete. Id. at 192.) Mr. Hardy also described interim search efforts that the FBI had conducted in an attempt to comply with the order. He said that the FBI had manually searched two of the three files named in the order, which contained about 4,100 pages. And with respect to the 174A-OC56120 file, the agency had performed an electronic search. He described that search as a text search of the ZyIndex which is not a shared drive, but rather is an automated system component which has been used by the OKBOMB Task Force. ZyIndex is an off-the[-]shelf software application that indexes words and phrases to allow an electronic retrieval of documents. An initial text search conducted on the ZyIndex indicates that there are approximately 340 documents that are potentially responsive to plaintiff's request. It took two individuals two days to conduct this burdensome search of the index for the terms Elohim/Poverty; Elhoim/Poverty; OKBOMB/Poverty; BOMBROB/Poverty; McVeigh/Poverty; Guthrie/Poverty; Nichols/Poverty; Mahon/Poverty; Millar/Poverty; Brescia/Poverty; Langan/Poverty; and Strassmeir/Poverty. Id. at 205 (footnotes omitted). The 340 potentially responsive documents had not yet been reviewed by the agency to weed out duplicates and to determine whether the documents were responsive and not covered by FOIA exemptions. In addition, Mr. Hardy provided the context behind the FBI's teletype instructing its field offices not to upload into the ACS system any documents from the investigation into the death of Mr. Trentadue's brother. Such uploading, Mr. Hardy explained, would have made the text of these classified documents available electronically, thereby jeopardizing the security and privacy of FBI employees. (Apparently, some FBI employees were subjects of the investigation and others were witnesses.) The documents would still be retrievable through an electronic search of the FBI's computerized indices. The district court stayed its initial order pending further briefing. It added that [t]o the extent that [the FBI has] discovered documents that are responsive to Plaintiffs's FOIA requests (as interpreted by [the FBI]) and to which [the FBI does] not assert any FOIA exemption, [it] shall produce such documents as they become available. Id. at 239. On July 22, 2005, the FBI produced 17 documents and filed a Notice of Release of Documents to Plaintiff with the court. Id. at 240. Still unsatisfied, Mr. Trentadue filed a response to this notice on July 28, 2005. He claimed that the documents produced were improperly redacted and that the FBI could have produced more documents because (1) the documents produced referenced other responsive documents (e.g., enclosures with teletypes) that were not produced; (2) the oldest document produced was generated a week after the Oklahoma City Bombing, even though the FBI's undercover investigations had allegedly begun before the bombing; and (3) the FBI still had not yet performed searches using the terms Morris Dees or the initials SPLC. The FBI responded that its production of the 17 documents was not in bad faith. It maintained that it had not omitted documents that were referenced by the documents it had produced. Another declaration from David Hardy explained that [i]f a released document referred to or referenced another document, the referred to or referenced document was also released if it, too, was responsive to plaintiff's FOIA requests. . . . Id. Vol. 2 at 497. Likewise, [e]nclosures referred to by a released document were included in the July 21 release, if the enclosures were located in the FBI's search. There were two such enclosures. Id. at 498. Hardy noted that follow-up searches were sometimes necessary to locate these enclosures, because [a]s a general matter, in the filing process, enclosures often become separated from their cover documents. Id. Two enclosures were not located. One was a floppy disk; Hardy stated that [f]loppy disk enclosures are destroyed in the ordinary course. Id. The other was a newspaper article, although the article was identified [in the released document] with sufficient specificity for [Mr. Trentadue] to obtain the document from public sources, should he so desire. Id. In an order issued on March 30, 2006, the district court declined to reconsider its earlier finding that the FBI's initial search had not been reasonably calculated to uncover responsive documents. The court did, however, agree with the FBI that it need not produce the BOMBROB-Funding Memorandum, whose failure to mention either Dees or the SPLC made it nonresponsive to Mr. Trentadue's initial FOIA requests. And it agreed with almost all the FBI's redactions. Most relevant to this appeal, it relieved [the FBI] of conducting a manual search of the OKBOMB file. . . . Id. Vol. 3 at 902. Instead, the court ordered the FBI to conduct searches like those already conducted but using the names Morris Dees (overruling the FBI's privacy contention) and SPLC (the FBI had employed the search term poverty in its ZyIndex to cull documents mentioning the Southern Poverty Law Center). The court noted: [I]t is so troubling that . . . the disclosed documents also refer to other attachments that at one time appear to have accompanied the document, yet these documents have not been produced. While the FBI's failure to discover documents is not necessarily an indication of bad faith, it is puzzling that so many documents could be referenced but not produced. But given the nature of Plaintiff's initial FOIA request and the searches that have been conducted by the FBI thus far, the court declines to order further searches beyond what the court has ordered above. It appears likely, however, that the FBI has not seen the last FOIA request from Plaintiff. Id. at 901. After further searching, the FBI produced one additional document.