Vice Media has filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Federal Bureau of Investigation regarding their activities leading up to the contentious presidential election. The lawsuit, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia by FOIA attorney Jeffrey Light on Tuesday, “seeks public disclosure of specified government records to make sense of the pivotal role of the FBI, as well as of other agencies, in perhaps the most controversial presidential election in modern U.S. history.” The lawsuit was filed with Ryan Shapiro, who is a research affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University and a doctoral candidate at MIT. The other plaintiff in the lawsuit is Vice News investigative reporter Jason Leopold. Just days before the presidential election, FBI Director James Comey re-opened an investigation into Democratic Presidential nominee Hillary Clinton's emails and issued a letter to U.S. lawmakers remarking that new emails had been found in an "unrelated case." The new batch of emails were discovered following an investigation into former Democratic U.S. congressman Anthony Weiner. The new email findings led to no charges on Clinton.
Clinton and her campaign have blamed her loss in the tight presidential election on the actions of the FBI and Comey. Vice News, in the past weeks has filed multiple FOIA requests with the FBI. According to Vice, the most recent FOIA lawsuit seeks for the FBI to disclose information regarding:
• ��Allegations of the FBI violating the Hatch Act by allegedly using its authority to influence the course of the 2016 U.S. presidential election• ��Internal discontent at the FBI regarding the bureau’s Hillary Clinton investigations
• ��All leaks of information by the FBI to the media and political operatives about FBI investigations of Clinton
• ��All FBI communications with Breitbart News; Breitbart executive chairman Steve Bannon, who Trump named his chief strategist and White House counselor after Bannon served as his campaign CEO; former Trump campaign manager Corey R. Lewandowski, Fox News, and Fox News hosts Bret Baier and Sean Hannity; former New York City mayor and Trump adviser Rudy Giuliani; and Republican strategist and Trump campaign adviser Roger Stone
• ��White nationalist Richard Spencer, his National Policy Institute, and the “alt-right.”
Vice News has also recently been in headlines for partnering with the Center for Employment Opportunities to offer apprenticeships to employ and train formerly incarcerated individuals. Read more about the program here. Only time will tell if efforts to stop Donald Trump from reaching the White House will be fruitful. Read the Vice article regarding the FBI FOIA lawsuit in it's entirety by heading here.
