Opinion ID: 333210
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: 'Final Opinions'

Text: 17 We look first at the language of subsection (a)(2). Defendants do not deny that the Regional Office is an 'agency' of the United States; 14 nor can they plausibly maintain, after Sears, that the Regional Director's decisions were not reached in the 'adjudication' of 'cases.' See 421 U.S. at 158--59, 95 S.Ct. at 1520, 44 L.Ed.2d at 51--52. We also believe that these decisions possess the 'finality' demanded by subsection (a)(2)(A), notwithstanding the charging party's right to appeal a dismissal to the General Counsel's office in Washington. Paraphrasing apt language from Sears, 421 U.S. at 158--59 n. 25, 95 S.Ct. at 1520, 44 L.Ed.2d at 52 n. 25: '(T)he possibility that the decision reached' by the Regional Director 'may be overturned in an Appeals Memorandum . . . does not affect its finality for our purposes. The decision . . ., in the absence of an appeal filed by the charging party, has real operative effect, as much as does every order issued by a United States District Court which might, if appealed, be overturned by a United States Court of Appeals.' The Regional Director, like the General Counsel in Sears, has power to make a final disposition of a claim by dismissing it. This is effective law-making power, and the thrust of subsection (a)(2) is toward allowing the public to know what 'the law' is. 15 18 Despite these considerations, Kent's argument has a fatal flaw: the materials at issue in this case are not 'opinions.' We are guided in this regard by Renegotiation Board v. Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corp., 421 U.S. 168, 95 S.Ct. 1491, 44 L.Ed.2d 57 (1975), a companion case to Sears. In Grumman the plaintiff sought, inter alia, reports prepared by 'Divisions' or subcommittees composed of three of the Renegotiation Board's five members. The full Board used these reports as a springboard for discussion in the course of deciding whether to require contractors to refund 'excessive profits' to the government. The Court held that these division reports were not to be treated as final opinions of the Board. For, after discussing a written memorandum's rationale, the Board might act for an entirely different reason; indeed, the individual author of the report might change his viewpoint after discussion and accept arguments quite different from the (possibly quite tentative) ideas he had expressed in writing. Echoing the philosophy of Exemption 5, the Court declared itself 'unwilling to deprive the Board of a thoroughly uninhibited version of this valuable deliberative tool.' 19 In the present case no document in controversy purports to explain why the Regional Director decided not to issue a complaint in the various instances. The 'Final Investigation Reports' as originally written do not do so. They express the tentative views of the Birmingham attorneys who wrote them. They state reasons that could account for Regional Director Phillips' decisions, but there is no assurance that Phillips accepted those reasons. They are precisely the sort of predecisional documents that Sears identifies as the intra-agency memoranda mentioned in the FOIA. As we held in Wu v. National Endowment for Humanities, 460 F.2d 1030, 1032 (C.A.5, 1972), 'advice, recommendations, opinions, and other subjective material are protected' by Exemption 5. 20 The further question is whether the presence of the notations made in the margins of these reports changes anything. Of course, disclosure of the notations by themselves would be a futile endeavor, even assuming they are not exempt; apart from their context, they are gibberish. We understand Kent to argue, however, that the whole is greater than its parts--that these reports and their marginal annotations together (perhaps with the latter 'incorporating by reference' the former) are 'final opinions.' We think they are not. From our in camera inspection of the documents, we can say that these ambiguous scribbles do not clearly show the basis of the decisions in question. But even if these markings were both coherent and lucid, the case could come out no differently. There would be no assurance that they represented the institutional view of the Regional Office. Even Phillips' own copies of the reports might, for all we could tell, be inscribed with only some of the reasons behind his choice. And some of the points to be found in the margins might be tentative conclusions, put on paper only while he was on the way to making up his mind. A fortiori, we could depend on Davis' and Howard's copies of the reports to reveal only part of 'the decision,' not necessarily all of it. The copies would not--could not--show the extent (if any) to which the Regional Director conveyed his views by oral statements that were never recorded. 21 Under the District Court's order the agency would have had to comb through the reports and pick out those sentences or paragraphs which represented the ultimate basis of its actions; to articulate its reasoning more coherently and logically than the reports, and later the handwritten notes, themselves did; in short, to create a final opinion. But '(t)he Freedom of Information Act imposes no independent obligation on agencies to write opinions. It simply requires them to disclose the opinions which they do write.' Grumman, 421 U.S. at 192, 95 S.Ct. at 1504, 44 L.Ed.2d at 75. 16 22 The policies that Exemption 5 was meant to foster are illustrated, ironically, by Kent's own motives for seeking these documents. Kent claims that it needs access to the reports in order to determine whether Board personnel are hostile and prejudiced against its cause. Thus in the unfair labor practice litigation Kent is trying to probe the mental processes and motives of the individual decision-maker, rather than to question the objective legal validity of the institutional decision. In the circumstances of this case, 17 this effort is inconsistent with a basic principle of administrative law. The Supreme Court announced the general bar against probing mental processes in the Morgan cases, 18 and decisions of this Circuit have held it applicable to NLRB prosecutorial processes. 19 The point is significant in construing Exemption 5, 20 which was enacted to free decision-makers from the 'threat of cross-examination in a public tribunal,' Ackerley v. Ley, 137 U.S.App.D.C. 133, 420 F.2d 1336, 1341 (1969); see EPA v. Mink, 410 U.S. 73, 93 S.Ct. 827, 35 L.Ed.2d 119 (1973). In view of Kent's position, it is hardly speculative to say that decision-makers would be exposed to just such threats if intra-agency advice memoranda were generally held disclosable whenever they could arguably be viewed as 'final opinions.' ', a court which does not consider probing mental processes part of its reviewing task will hardly read (Exemption 5's) language as requiring disclosure of documents for solely that purpose.' 21 23 We also cannot overlook the fact that one of the Regional Director's decisions not to issue a complaint was indeed expressed in an opinion. In Case No. 10--CA--10272 the charging party (the Boilermakers' Union) declined to withdraw the allegations that the Regional Director had disapproved. Consequently a letter of dismissal was issued, formally notifying the union that certain charges would not be pursued and explaining reasons for the decision. It was drafted by Howard and signed by the then Acting Regional Director. Here was a document that was truly post-decisional and did enunciate a basis for the agency's conclusion. Had an appeal been taken to Washington, this letter would have expressed to the General Counsel the Regional Office's view of the matter. When laid against this opinion, the marked-up investigation reports appear all the more clearly to be 'predecisional.' 22 24