Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington v. DOJ, No. 18-5116 (D.C. Cir. 2019)
Annotate this CaseCREW seeks to compel the DOJ's Office of Legal Counsel to make available all of its formal written opinions, as well as indices of those opinions, under the so-called "reading-room" provision of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The DC Circuit affirmed the district court's dismissal of CREW's complaint for failure to state a claim in light of the court's decision in Electronic Frontier Foundation v. United States Department of Justice (EFF), 739 F.3d 1 (D.C. Cir. 2014). In this case, there was no dispute that the formal written opinions the OLC has declined to publish were "withheld" "agency records." The court held that CREW has not plausibly alleged that the OLC's formal written notices have all been adopted by the agencies to which they were addressed, subjecting the opinions to disclosure under FOIA's reading room provision as the"working law" of those agencies.
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