Opinion ID: 311379
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Intra-agency Memoranda

Text: 55 The Commission asserted below that inspection of the memoranda used in the preparation of the budget request and the memoranda used to determine the value to the recipient of the privileges granted could not be ordered. It pointed to section 552(b)(5) of the Act, which exempts inter-agency or intraagency memorandums or letters which would not be available by law to a party other than an agency in litigation with the agency. 32 The District Court made no further inquiry into the matter, and the Commission produced nothing except a flat assertion that the documents contained policy arguments and were confidential. 33 56 Both our own cases 34 and the Supreme Court's recent holding in Environmental Protection Agency v. Mink 35 make it clear that this is insufficient. In Mink the Supreme Court said: 57 Congress sensibly discarded a wooden exemption that could have meant disclosure of manifestly private and confidential policy recommendations simply because the document containing them also happened to contain factual data. That decision should not be taken, however, to embrace an equally wooden exemption permitting the withholding of factual material otherwise available on discovery merely because it was placed in a memorandum with matters of law, policy or opinion. 36 58 This distinction is particularly important here, where the memoranda at issue relate to the development of a fee schedule said to have been derived from cost data and collections of financial reports. The Commission must show that any factual matter in the memoranda is so intertwined with policymaking processes that it would violate the purpose of the exemption to disclose it. 37 59 Mink went on to point out that the District Court may use a variety of tools in making this determination, including, but not limited to, in camera inspection of some or all of the documents. 38 Additionally, we note that the District Court in the Southern District of New York has recently resolved such a Freedom of Information Act case by appointing a Master and delegating the task of in camera inspection to him. 39 2. Confidential Financial Statements 60 It is equally unclear whether the confidential financial statements that the Commission allegedly used in determining value to the recipient of the privileges granted fall within the scope of the Act's exemption for trade secrets and commercial or financial information obtained from a person and privileged or confidential. 40 The exemption does not protect all data contained in such filings, but only that information which cannot be rendered sufficiently anonymous by deletion of the filing party's name and other identifying information. 41 61 In those cases in which the party that filed the statement is so large or unique that disclosure of the data itself would destroy the confidentiality of that party, it is conceivable that total nondisclosure would be justified. But the Commission's witnesses testified that there are many thousands of such statements filed over a long period of time, and it seems highly improbable that the Commission will be able to establish that they must all be withheld. 62 This, too, will be an appropriate subject for the District Court on the remand, armed with the flexible tools cited by Mink. In particular, the Court should take note of the Supreme Court's suggestion that representative samples of the statements be examined, rather than the thousands that apparently exist. 42 But, before this examination is undertaken, the Commission should be required to state which, if any, of these documents were used in the preparation of its rules. As we have pointed out, the scope of the NCTA's request was coextensive with the scope of the Commission's documentary basis for its rules. 63 Reversed and remanded.