Court Opinion

ID: 9484562
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 09:57:13.716236+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:50:19.136544
License: Public Domain

McMILLIAN, Circuit Judge,
with whom RICHARD S. ARNOLD, Chief Judge, joins, dissenting.
“Free people are, of necessity, informed; uninformed people can never be free.” Sen. Judiciary Comm., Freedom of Information, 88th Cong., 1st Sess. 3 (1963) (remarks of Sen. Edward Long).
As discussed below, although I agree with much of the analysis in the majority opinion, I do not agree that the district court exceeded the scope of its authority when it ordered the Department of Justice (hereinafter the government) to prepare a Vaughn index of FBIHQ file 9-60052, the FBI’s investigatory file concerning the investigation into the disappearance and presumed murder of Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa in July 1975. Accordingly, I would deny the petition for writ of mandamus.
COLLATERAL ORDER
First, I do not agree that we have appellate jurisdiction to review the government’s appeal, No. 91-2164. As discussed below, the term “Vaughn index” is derived from Vaughn v. Rosen, 157 U.S.App.D.C. 340, 484 F.2d 820 (1973), cert. denied, 415 U.S. 977, 94 S.Ct. 1564, 39 L.Ed.2d 873 (1974), and a Vaughn index is typically a detailed affidavit which “permit[s] the court system effectively and efficiently to evaluate the factual nature of disputed information.” Id., 484 F.2d at 826. In my view, the district court order in the present ease requiring the preparation of a Vaughn index was essentially a discovery order in this FOIA litigation. Discovery orders are “generally not appealable as collateral orders even when they are attacked as burdensome.” Hinton v. Department of Justice, 844 F.2d 126, 131 (3d Cir.1988). The Vaughn index is not an end in itself; by definition, the Vaughn index does not itself disclose anything of substance. “[A] Vaughn index does not accord a requester any of the substantive relief [the requester] seeks.... Rather, the [Vaughn] index is a tool for determining the requester’s substantive rights [under FOIA].” Id. at 130.
It is true that “[the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) ] was not intended to supplement or displace rules of discovery.” John Doe Agency v. John Doe Corp., 493 U.S. 146, 153, 110 S.Ct. 471, 475, 107 L.Ed.2d 462 (1989). However, the present case involves only the FOIA requests themselves. It is a discrete civil action. The FOIA is not being used here as a discovery tool to supplement or displace discovery in connection with other litigation, for example, other criminal or civil proceedings. In discovery proceedings the issue is whether the information sought is relevant and necessary; however, in FOIA litigation the only issue is whether the agency has properly withheld the information sought' under one of the specific statutory exemptions. See, e.g., North v. Walsh, 279 U.S.App.D.C. 373, 881 F.2d 1088, 1095 (1989) (FOIA request seeking documents from Office of Independent Counsel concerning ongoing criminal investigation of plaintiff).
I also do not agree that the district court order is appealable under the final collateral order exception. Hinton v. Department of Justice, 844 F.2d at 131. Collateral orders are appealable if (1) the order conclusively decides the disputed issue, (2) the issue is entirely distinct from the merits of the case, and (3) the order would be effectively unre-viewable if the appeal were postponed until the issuance of a final order. Coopers & Lybrand v. Livesay, 437 U.S. 463, 468, 98 S.Ct. 2454, 2457, 57 L.Ed.2d 351 (1978); Cohen v. Beneficial Industrial Loan Corp., 337 U.S. 541, 546, 69 S.Ct. 1221, 1225, 93 L.Ed. 1528 (1949). At this point in the present case, the district court has only ordered the preparation of a Vaughn index and has yet to *1312conclusively decide the merits of the government’s claim of exemption under Exemption 7(A). The district court agreed to consider the Vaughn index in camera; the district court has not even decided whether or not to disclose the Vaughn index itself to the public or counsel for plaintiff. As noted above, the preparation of a Vaughn index “does not accord a requester any of the substantive relief [he or she] seeks.” Id. at 130. The substantive relief the requester wants is access to the government’s records, not the preparation of or access to the Vaughn index of those records. The preparation of a Vaughn index is only a preliminary or preparatory step. . As was noted by the panel majority opinion, the present case
is unique because it is not a review of a district court’s order that documents be disclosed, nor is it a review of a district court’s decision that documents are exempt from disclosure. [The present] case asks us to determine what a district court may do while deciding whether documents are or are not exempt from disclosure.
950 F.2d at 533.
MANDAMUS
In the present case the government does not argue the district court abused its discretion in ordering a Vaughn index; the government argues the district court lacked the authority to order a Vaughn index. The government has thus presented the issue in terms of the power or authority of the district court. The government argues that Exemption 7(A) is different from other FOIA exemptions and that the district court can never require the preparation of a Vaughn index when the government agency invokes Exemption 7(A). As noted by the panel majority opinion, this is a novel argument that squarely challenges the authority of the district court to act. 950 F.2d at 532. Because the government has presented its argument in terms of the district court’s authority to act, and not in terms of whether or not the district court abused its discretion, I agree that, under these unique circumstances, we have jurisdiction to review the district court order by petition for writ of mandamus.
THE VAUGHN INDEX
A healthy distrust of government, and a corresponding suspicion of government se-
crecy, is the underlying premise of FOIA. FOIA “seeks to permit access to official information long shielded unnecessarily from public view and attempts to create a judicially enforceable public right to secure such information from possibly unwilling official hands.” EPA v. Mink, 410 U.S. 73, 80, 93 S.Ct. 827, 832, 35 L.Ed.2d 119 (1973). “The basic purpose of FOIA is to ensure an informed citizenry, vital to the functioning of a democratic society, needed to check against corruption and to hold the governors accountable to the governed.” NLRB v. Robbins Tire & Rubber Co., 437 U.S. 214, 242, 98 S.Ct. 2311, 2327, 57 L.Ed.2d 159 (1978) (Robbins ). FOIA’s “general philosophy [is] ‘full agency disclosure unless information is exempted under clearly delineated statutory language.’ ” Department of Air Force v. Rose, 425 U.S. 352, 360-61, 96 S.Ct. 1592, 1599, 48 L.Ed.2d 11 (1976), citing S.Rep. No. 813, 89th Cong., 1st Sess. 3 (1965). “‘Congress realized that legitimate governmental and private interests could be harmed by release of certain types of information,’ and therefore provided the ‘specific exemptions under which disclosure could be refused.’ ” John Doe Agency v. John Doe Corp., 493 U.S. at 152, 110 S.Ct. at 475, citing FBI v. Abramson, 456 U.S. 615, 621, 102 S.Ct. 2054, 2059, 72 L.Ed.2d 376 (1982). The statutory exemptions are to be narrowly construed, Department of Air Force v. Rose, 425 U.S. at 361, 96 S.Ct. at 1599, the district courts review the claim of exemptions de novo, and the burden of justifying nondisclosure, that is, the burden of establishing that the information requested is protected from disclosure by a specific exemption, is on the agency. See 5 U.S.C. § 552(a)(4)(B).
As noted by the panel majority opinion, the district court’s responsibility to review de novo the. government’s claimed exemptions is complicated by the fact that “ordinarily a government agency, and not the court, has access to the documents in question.” 950 F.2d at 533. “The party requesting the disclosure must rely upon his [or her] adversary’s representations as to the material withheld, and the court is deprived of the benefit of informed advocacy to draw its attention to the weaknesses in the withhold*1313ing agency’s arguments.” Wiener v. FBI, 943 F.2d 972, 977 (9th Cir.1991), cert. denied, — U.S. -, 112 S.Ct. 8013, 120 L.Ed.2d 886 (1992). This is the precise difficulty at the heart of the present case and it is also what precipitated the invention of the Vaughn index.
[I]t is anomalous but obviously inevitable that the party with the greatest interest in obtaining disclosure is at a loss to argue with desirable legal precision for the revelation of the concealed information. Obviously, the party seeking disclosure cannot know the precise contents of the documents sought; secret information is, by definition, unknown to the party seeking disclosure----
In a very real sense, only one side to the controversy (the side opposing disclosure) is in a position confidently to make statements categorizing information, and this case provides a classic example of such a situation.
Vaughn v. Rosen, 484 F.2d at 823-24. Thus, in FOIA litigation, the plaintiff, the party seeking disclosure, is placed in the awkward and frustrating position of speculating about the likely contents of documents that it has never seen.
In Vaughn v. Rosen the plaintiff was a law professor doing research on the Civil Service Commission. The professor sought disclosure of the evaluations of certain government agencies’ personnel management programs and certain other special reports of the Bureau of Personnel Management. The government claimed that the documents contained information of a personal nature about the government agency employees and that disclosure would constitute an invasion of the employees’ personal privacy. The court of appeals noted that the plaintiffs lack of knowledge necessarily meant that he quite literally did not know, and therefore could not inform the court, whether or not the government’s factual characterization of the documents as containing information of a personal nature was accurate. Id., 484 F.2d at 824. The court of appeals observed that the plaintiffs lack of knowledge not only hampered his ability to litigate in the district court (he was essentially limited to arguing that the exemption is very narrow and that the general nature of the documents sought made it unlikely that they contained personal information), but
[t]his lack of knowledge by the party seeking disclosure seriously distorts the traditional adversary nature of our legal system’s form of dispute resolution. Ordinarily, the facts relevant to a dispute are more or less equally available to adverse parties. In a case arising under the FOIA this is not true, ... and hence the typical process of dispute resolution is impossible....-
The problem is compounded at the appellate level. In reviewing a determination of exemption, an appellate court must consider the appropriateness of a trial court’s characterization of the factual nature of the information. Frequently trial courts’ holdings in FOIA cases are stated in very conclusory terms, saying simply that the information falls under one or another of the exemptions to [FOIA]. An appellate court, like the trial court, is completely without the controverting illumination that would ordinarily accompany a request to review a lower court’s factual determination; it must conduct its own investigation into the document. The scope of inquiry will not have been focused by the adverse parties and, if justice is to be done, the examination must be relatively comprehensive. Obviously, an appellate court is even less suited to making this inquiry than is a trial court.
Id., 484 F.2d at 824-25. The FOIA requester in the present case is in the same position as the law professor in Vaughn v. Rosen.
The Vaughn v. Rosen court concluded that, contrary to the intent of Congress, FOIA “actually encourage[d] the Government to contend that large masses of information are exempt, when in fact part of the information should be disclosed.” Id., 484 F.2d at 826. Not only did FOIA contain “no inherent incentives that would affirmatively spur government agencies to disclose information,” id., but “since the burden of determining the justifiability of a government claim of exemption currently falls on the court system, ... [FOIA] encourage[d] agencies automatically to claim the broadest possible grounds for exemption for the greatest amount of infor*1314mation.” Id. These concerns compelled the Vaughn v. Rosen court to develop what has become known as the Vaughn index in order to “(1) assure that a party’s right to information is not submerged beneath governmental obfuscation and mischaracterization, and (2) permit the court system effectively and efficiently to evaluate the factual nature of disputed information.” Id.
As noted by the panel majority opinion, [tjhere is no prescribed form for a Vaughn index; any form is acceptable as long as the affidavits provided by the government assist the court’s efforts to decide the issues at hand. Regardless of form, however, certain components are integral parts of any Vaughn index. Specifically, Vaughn indices usually communicate descriptions of each and every document contained in the file, including a general description of each document’s contents and general facts about their creation (such as date, time, and place). For each document, the exemption claimed by the government is identified, and an explanation as to why the exemption applies to the document in question is provided.
950 F.2d at 533 (citations omitted). “Specificity is the defining requirement of the Vaughn index and affidavit; affidavits cannot support summary judgment [upholding the government’s claimed exemption] if they are ‘conclusory, merely reciting statutory standards, or if they are too vague or sweeping.’ ” King v. United States Department of Justice, 265 U.S.App.D.C. 62, 830 F.2d 210, 219 (1987) (footnotes omitted). “To accept an inadequately supported exemption claim ‘would constitute an abandonment of the trial court’s obligation under the FOIA to conduct a de novo review.’ ” Id. Whether the government’s affidavit or affidavits constitute an adequate Vaughn index is a question of law reviewed de novo. Wiener v. FBI, 943 F.2d at 978, citing Binion v. United States Department of Justice, 695 F.2d 1189, 1193 (9th Cir.1983).
Preparation of the Vaughn index does more than require the government agency to review and classify the documents in question. The resulting Vaughn index is more than a litigation tool that the FOIA requester can use to challenge the government’s withholding of those documents. It is important to remember that requiring the government agency to prepare a Vaughn index
forces the government to analyze carefully any material withheld, it enables the trial court to fulfill its duty of ruling on the applicability of the exemption, and it enables the adversary system to operate by giving, the requester as much information as possible, on the basis of which he [or she] can present his [or her] case to the trial court.
Lykins v. Department of Justice, 233 U.S.App.D.C. 349, 725 F.2d 1455, 1463 (1984). “The index thus functions to restore the adversary process to some extent, and to permit more effective judicial review of the agency’s decision.” Wiener v. FBI, 943 F.2d at 977-78; see also Davis v. CIA, 711 F.2d 858, 861 (8th Cir.1983), cert. denied, 465 U.S. 1035, 104 S.Ct. 1307, 79 L.Ed.2d 705 (1984).
ROBBINS DECISION
As has already been discussed, Exemption 7(A) is the law enforcement exemption and provides that disclosure is not required of “matters that are ... investigatory records or information compiled for law enforcement purposes, but only to the extent that the production of such law enforcement records or information ... could reasonably be expected to interfere with enforcement proceedings.” 5 U.S.C. § 552(b)(7)(A). In the present case the government argues the district court lacked the authority to require the preparation of a Vaughn index because a Vaughn index is not required when Exemption 7(A) is invoked, citing Robbins, 437 U.S. at 223-24, 234-36, 98 S.Ct. at 2317-18, 2323. In Robbins the FOIA plaintiff was an employer seeking disclosure of witness statements prior to an unfair labor practice hearing. Following a contested representation election, the regional director of the NLRB filed an unfair labor practice charge against the employer for pre-election actions. A hearing was scheduled.. Prior to the hearing, the employer sought disclosure of all potential witnesses’ statements collected by the NLRB during its investigation. The regional director denied the request on the ground that the witness statements were exempt from disclosure under several FOIA exemp*1315tions, in particular Exemption 7(A). The employer appealed to the NLRB General Counsel. However, before the expiration of FOIA’s 20-day response period, 5 U.S.C. § 552(a)(4)(B), the employer filed a FOIA action in federal district court, seeking disclosure of the witness statements and an injunction against holding the hearing until the documents had been disclosed. The NLRB argued that witness statements were exempt from disclosure under Exemption 7(A) because their production would interfere with an enforcement proceeding, the pending unfair labor practice hearing. The district court disagreed and ordered the NLRB to produce the witness statements.
The issue whether Exemption 7(A) was generic, or categorical, or case-specific emerged on appeal. The court of appeals rejected the NLRB’s categorical or generic approach and concluded that the 1974 legislative history demonstrated that Exemption 7(A) was available only after a specific evi-dentiary showing of the possibility of actual interference in an individual case. Robbins Tire & Rubber Co. v. NLRB, 563 F.2d 724, 728 (5th Cir.1977). The court of appeals rejected the NLRB’s arguments that the premature revelation of its case through the production of the witness statements before the hearing was the kind of interference that would justify nondisclosure and that pre-hearing production of witness statements would discourage potential witnesses from making statements at all. Id. at 729-31. The court of appeals acknowledged that the possibility of “interference” in the form of witness intimidation by the employer during the period between disclosure of the witness statements to the employer, and the hearing, but held that the NLRB had failed to demonstrate that the witness statements were exempt because it had not introduced any evidence that witness intimidation was likely in this particular ease. Id. at 732. But see, e.g., Title Guarantee Co. v. NLRB, 534 F.2d 484, 491 (2d Cir.) (holding statements of employees and union representatives obtained in NLRB investigation exempt frbm disclosure under Exemption 7(A) until completion of administrative and judicial proceedings), cert. denied, 429 U.S. 834, 97 S.Ct. 98, 50 L.Ed.2d 99 (1976).
The Supreme Court reversed. The Court endorsed the generic, or categorical, interpretation of Exemption 7(A) and held that “witness statements in pending unfair labor practice proceedings are exempt from FOIA disclosure at least until completion of the Board’s hearing.” 437 U.S. at 236, 98 S.Ct. at 2324. First, the Court noted that the language of the exemption, specifically the plural reference to “enforcement proceedings,” suggested that “certain generic determinations” might be made under Exemption 7(A). Id. at 224, 98 S.Ct. at 2318. The Court concluded that the early legislative history supported this interpretation, id. at 225-26, 98 S.Ct. at 2318-19 (referring to Sen. Humphrey’s concerns in 1966 about the need to protect statements of agency witnesses from disclosure prior to agency proceedings, specifically witnesses in unfair labor practice proceedings), as well as the reported decisions until 1974. Id. at 226, 98 S.Ct. at 2319 (citing eases). The Court also noted that the legislative history of the 1974 amendment of Exemption 7 showed “[t]hat the 1974 Congress did not mean to undercut the intent of the 1966 Congress with respect to Senator Humphrey’s concern about interference with pending NLRB enforcement proceedings.” Id. at 232, 98 S.Ct. at 2322; see id. at 226-32, 98 S.Ct. at 2319-22 (noting background of 1974 amendment, particularly Congressional disapproval of several D.C.Cir. decisions upholding “blanket exemptions” for all government records contained in investigatory files that had been compiled for law enforcement purposes; 1974 amendment changed scope of exemption from “files” to “records” and enumerated specific purposes and objectives of exemption).
The Court concluded that “Congress did not intend to prevent the federal courts from determining that, with respect to particular kinds of law enforcement proceedings, disclosure of particular kinds of investigatory records while a case is pending would generally ‘interfere with enforcement proceedings.’ ” Id. at 236, 98 S.Ct. at 2324. The Court agreed that “[t]he most obvious risk of interference with enforcement proceedings in this context is that employers or, in some cases, unions will coerce or intimidate employees and others who have given statements, in an effort to make them change their testimony *1316or not testify at all.” Id. at 239, 98 S.Ct. at 2325. In addition, prehearing disclosure of witnesses’ statements “would disturb the existing balance of relations in unfair labor practice proceedings,” id. at 236, 98 S.Ct. at 2324, especially since, “[hjistorically, the NLRB has provided little prehearing discovery in unfair labor practice proceedings and has relied principally on statements such as those sought here to prove its case.” Id. The Court also noted that the use of FOIA as the mechanism for providing a litigant with earlier and greater access to the agency’s case than the litigant would otherwise have was likely to cause substantial delays in the administrative process and thus interfere with enforcement proceedings. Id. at 237-38, 98 S.Ct. at 2324.5
APPLICATION OF EXEMPTION 7(A)
I do not think Robbins supports the government’s argument in the present case. As noted by the panel majority opinion, after Robbins endorsed the generic, or categorical, application of Exemption 7(A), many courts of appeals
altered their views on the need for a Vaughn index when Exemption 7(A) is involved. The rationale underlying these post-Robbins decisions has been that a Vaughn index is unnecessary because the government is permitted to demonstrate interference based on categories of documents and need not demonstrate interference with enforcement proceedings on a document-by-document basis. E.g., Church of Scientology v. IRS, 792 F.2d 146, 152 (D.C.Cir.1986) (Scalia, J.); Barney v. IRS, 618 F.2d 1268, 1273 (8th Cir.1980) (per curiam). Moreover, in each of these cases, the appellate court was reviewing a district court’s decision not to require a Vaughn index when the government had already provided adequate descriptions of the documents sought, as well as adequate explanations as to how the particular types of documents at issue could interfere with law enforcement proceedings.
At no time, however, has an appellate court suggested that Robbins alters the district court’s statutory obligation to review the claimed exemption’s applicability. Robbins does not allow for exemption merely because documents appear in a law enforcement agency’s file. When an agency relies upon Robbins and offers categorical justifications for exemption under Exemption 7(A), the agency must still review each document individually.... The district court is well within its authority to verify that the agency has actually examined and properly categorized each document. It may accomplish this task by requiring an affidavit that describes, on a document-by-document basis, the documents in the file, the categories into which each document is placed, and a description of how disclosure of each category of documents might interfere with enforcement proceedings. Robbins merely prevents a district court from ordering a document-by-doeument explanation as to how each document will interfere with enforcement proceedings. In other words, though the district court cannot require the government to justify its decision to deny disclosure on a document-by-doeument basis, it can require the government to justify its chosen categorization on a document-by-document basis.
950 F.2d at 533-34 (parenthetical omitted from Barney citation; citations omitted; footnote omitted).
In Robbins it was not disputed that the documents in question were in fact witness *1317statements. Nor was it disputed in Robbins that, at least in general, disclosure of witness statements prior to the Unfair labor practice proceeding could interfere with that proceeding. What was disputed was whether the agency could rely on that generality or whether the agency had to make a specific factual showing that disclosure of those particular witness statements would interfere with that particular proceeding. Similarly, in Barney v. IRS, there was no dispute about the categorization of the documents in question; the district court and this court were “satisfied that the government’s affidavits adequately described the documents, the categories to which they belonged, and the possible harms of disclosure.” 950 F.2d at 534, citing 618 F.2d at 1272-73 (witness statements, documentary evidence, IRS agent’s work papers, internal agency memoranda). See Curran v. Department of Justice, 813 F.2d 473, 476 (1st Cir.1987) (apparent from agency affidavit that agency conducted individualized, document-by-document search, subdivided records into types and then into functional categories).
The same cannot be said in the present case. Here, the parties disputed not only the nature of the individual documents, but also the type of category used by the government, as well as the appropriate categorization or placement of the documents into particular categories. This basic lack of agreement about the nature and categorization of the documents distinguishes the present case from Robbins and Barney.
In the present case, the district court required preparation of a Vaughn index, and in response the government filed several public affidavits or declarations and a document which it captioned a “categorical index.” The district court was clearly not satisfied with the government’s response. As noted by the penal majority opinion, “[t]he district court’s dissatisfaction [with the government’s response was] understandable given the government’s blanket assertion that all 13,800 documents, accumulated over a 15-year span, fit neatly into nine categories described over the course of five pages.” Id. at 535; cf. Wiener v. FBI, 943 F.2d at 978 (noting the FBI’s use of “boilerplate” explanations drawn from a “master” FOIA response). Furthermore, the district court believed that the FOIA requester had raised serious questions about the validity of the government’s search and categorization of the documents. Id. Compare Curran v. Department of Justice, 813 F.2d at 476 (district court found no réason to impugn good faith of agency). The district court also concluded that it needed additional information “about each document, not only to verify that the government has fulfilled its obligation to examine each document, but also to enable it to understand or challenge the categories created by the government.” 950 F.2d at 535.
By requiring the preparation of a Vaughn index in the present case, the district court was attempting to develop an adequate record. Only the government knows what is in the Hoffa file; the FOIA requester and the district court do not know, much less this court. As noted above, the record indicates, only that the file consists of at least 13,800 pages in 70 volumes; the file is almost certainly larger now. Some of these pages are public source material which the government has already made available to the FOIA requester. According to the categorical index, which consists of a total of five double-spaced pages, each and every page falls within one of nine categories, the disclosure of which could reasonably be expected to interfere with law enforcement proceedings. The district court’s dissatisfaction with the categorical index was directed more at the procedural and substantive accuracy of the government’s classification of individual pages than at the categories identified' by the government. (The majority opinion expresses no opinion on the sufficiency of the Baker affidavit and the categorical index. See supra at 1309 n. 4 supra.) In any event, as noted by the panel majority opinion, the district court’s concern about whether all the documents are, described by the government’s categories cannot be resolved merely by requiring more specific or more detailed categories. 950 F.2d at 535.
In my view, assuming for purposes of analysis that the government’s categories are sufficiently specific, the district court acted within its authority in requiring the government to verify that it had actually examined and accurately categorized each document. *1318Indeed, it was its duty to do so. King v. United States Department of Justice, 830 F.2d at 219 (acceptance of inadequately supported exemption claim “would constitute abandonment of the trial court’s obligation under FOIA to conduct a de novo review”). The district court did not know (and we do not know) whether the government’s categorization of the documents was correct or, for that matter, whether the government had examined each document individually. The district court decided that, without a Vaughn index, it could not verify whether there was a correlation between the documents and the categories. Because all the documents necessarily fall into exempt categories, unless the district court can verify that each document has been examined and accurately categorized, the Robbins categories will become “no more than smaller versions of the ‘blanket exemptions’ disapproved by Congress in its 1974 amendments of FOIA.” Bevis v. Department of State, 255 U.S.App.D.C. 347, 801 F.2d 1386, 1389 (1986), citing Robbins, 437 U.S. at 236, 98 S.Ct. at 2324.
As noted by the panel majority opinion, preparation of a Vaughn index in the present case does not require the government to demonstrate document-by-document how disclosure of each document could reasonably be expected to interfere with pending law enforcement proceedings. 950 F.2d at 535. Like the district court and the panel majority, I accept the category-by-category approach. What I do not accept is the government’s conclusory assertions that each and every document in the Hoffa file falls within one of its nine categories. In other words, what is disputed, and what the district court sought to verify by requiring the preparation of a Vaughn index, is whether the government’s categorization of each document is accurate. Without such a record, the FOIA requester cannot test the government’s claim of exemption, the district court cannot conduct the required de novo review of the government’s decision not to disclose (without undertaking the arduous task of actually reviewing the documents itself), and this court cannot conduct a meaningful review of the district court’s decision.
It should be noted that the district court could decide to modify its order requiring the government to prepare a Vaughn index for the entire Hoffa file. In the proceedings before the district court, the government argued that preparation of a Vaughn index for the entire Hoffa file would be inordinately time-consuming and would necessarily divert scarce resources from other law enforcement activities. The district court could require the government to prepare a Vaughn index for a representative sample of the documents in the Hoffa file. “Representative sampling is an appropriate procedure to test an agency’s FOIA exemption claims when a large number of documents are involved.” Bonner v. United States Department of State, 289 U.S.App.D.C. 56, 928 F.2d 1148, 1151 (1991); accord The Washington Post v. United States Department of Defense, 766 F.Supp. 1, 15 (D.D.C.1991).
Alternatively, the district court could decide to conduct an in camera review of a representative sample of the documents in the Hoffa file. In camera review is discretionary. Robbins, 437 U.S. at 224, 98 S.Ct. at 2318. Limited in camera review might be particularly helpful in the present case. “[A] finding of bad faith or contrary evidence is not a prerequisite to in camera review; a trial judge may order such an inspection ‘on the basis of an uneasiness, on a doubt [the judge] wants satisfied before [taking] responsibility for a de novo determination.’ ” Meeropol v. Meese, 252 U.S.App.D.C. 381, 790 F.2d 942, 958 (1986), citing Ray v. Turner, 190 U.S.App.D.C. 290, 587 F.2d 1187, 1195 (1978). One district judge and one appellate panel have examined in camera a selection made by the government of the documents contained in the Hoffa file and concluded that those documents established that the criminal investigation into Hoffa’s disappearance is active and continuing and that production of those records could reasonably be expected to interfere with enforcement proceedings. Dickerson v. Department of Justice, No. 90-CV-60045-AA, 1991 WL 337422, slip op. at 5-6 (E.D.Mich. July 31, 1991), aff'd, 992 F.2d 1426 (6th Cir.1993).
For the reasons set forth above, I would hold the district court has the authority to require the government to prepare a Vaughn index even when Exemption 7(A) is invoked *1319and would deny the government’s application for writ of mandamus.

. As noted by the majority opinion, at 1307 supra, the Supreme Court recently affirmed the Robbins categorical approach in United States Dep’t of Justice v. Landano, - U.S. -, -, ---, 113 S.Ct. 2014, 2021, 2023-24, 124 L.Ed.2d 84 (1993) (rejecting blanket exemption for "all” FBI sources as confidential for purposes of Exemption 7(D); however, "more narrowly defined circumstances” may support inference of confidentiality, for example, generic category of paid informants). See also United States Dep’t of Justice v. Reporters Comm. for Freedom of the Press, 489 U.S. 749, 109 S.Ct. 1468, 103 L.Ed.2d 774 (1989) (holding “rap sheets" constituted generic category of law enforcement records which could reasonably be expected to constitute an unwarranted invasion of privacy within meaning of Exemption 7(C)). I do not dispute the continued validity of the Robbins categorical approach. What is in dispute in the present case is whether, as a threshold matter, we know enough about the nature of the records in question to review the accuracy of the government’s classification of the records into generic categories. I submit that we do not.