-By Warner Todd Huston
Want to know what the Treasury Department is doing? Fork over $522,886 and they’ll tell you… maybe. At least that is what Noah Wood has found with a Treasury Dept. reply to his FOIA request.
In 1966 president Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), a law that requires the federal government to provide information on its inner workings to citizens that request it. Of course, these FOIA requests aren’t free. Oh, there is no fee for the request, mind you, but there are fees for the copies and the administrative time necessary to conduct the records searches. And therein lies the rub for Noah Wood, a Missouri attorney trying to recover his fees from a Libyan-backed company whose assets were frozen by the government.
Wood is trying to sue this Libyan-backed company and has requested from the U.S. government records on the purported millions of dollars of once-frozen assets owned by the company. In pursuit of this information, Wood sent an FOIA request to Treasury and received a cordial reply asking for the aforementioned fee to comply with his request.
Oddly, Treasury reported that it only charged $527,000 for all of last year’s FOIA requests.
One can only imagine that someone at Treasury is attempting to give Mr. Wood the raised middle digit and discourage him from further requests. After all, how is it possible that the administrative costs and xeroxing of these files could cost as much as all of last year’s FOIA request fees for thousands of FOIA requests.
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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer, has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and is featured on many websites such as RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, TheRealityCheck.org, RedState.com, Human Events Magazine, AmericanDailyReview.com, and the New Media Journal, among many, many others. Additionally, he has been a frequent guest on talk-radio programs to discuss his opinion editorials and current events and is currently the co-host of “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Conservatism” heard on BlogTalkRadio. Warner is also the editor of the Cook County Page for RedCounty.com.
He has also written for several history magazines and appears in the new book “Americans on Politics, Policy and Pop Culture” which can be purchased on amazon.com. He is also the owner and operator of PubliusForum.com. Feel free to contact him with any comments or questions : EMAIL Warner Todd Huston
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