The department is no longer demanding a $373,000 fee to research an FOI Act request from People for the American Way Foundation for records relating to government court sealings in the wake of Sept.11, 2001. Rather, the department flatly denied the request in March as "overly broad" and "unduly burdensome."
The foundation, which in a lawsuit accuses the government of improperly withholding documents that detail the secret post-Sept. 11 detentions of immigrants, recently asked the department to obtain from local U. S. attorneys and their assistants the number of "supersealed" cases that were entirely sealed from the public and to release the numbers according to geographic area.
But Marcia Berman, an attorney in the Justice Department's civil division, said during a March 17 hearing in federal court in Washington, D.C., that "while we certainly acknowledge that the plaintiffs have narrowed their request here, and we appreciate that, by limiting it to cases sealed in their entirety, that's still not as rare as it seems on its face, "according to the hearing transcript.
Berman cited the "many material witnesses who were picked up and arrested" immediately following Sept. 11, 2001, as the reason for the number of supersealed cases.
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