A minor kerfuffle erupted recently over letters sent by certain House committees, including the Committee on Financial Services, to agencies within their jurisdiction maintaining that future communications between the committee and the agency should be treated as “congressional records” not subject to the Freedom of Information Act. For example, this letter from Chairman Hensarling of the Financial Services Committee to the Treasury Department states in part:
Because of the often sensitive and confidential nature of [communications from the committee to Treasury], and in order to ensure the unfettered flow of information necessary to assist the Committee in performing its important legislative and oversight functions, the Committee intends to retain control of all such communications, and will be entrusting them to your agency only for use in handling those matters. Likewise, any documents created or compiled by your agency in connection with any responses to such Committee communications, including but not limited to any replies to the Committee, are also records of the Committee and remain subject to the Committee’s control.
All such documents and communications constitute congressional records, not “agency records,” for purposes of the Freedom of Information Act, and remain subject to congressional control even when in the physical possession of the Agency. As such, they should be segregated from agency records, and access to them should be limited to Agency personnel who need such access for purposes of providing information or assistance to the Committee.
The effect of this request, if honored by the agencies, would be to require each agency to withhold from FOIA requesters both any written communications from the committee and any documents created or compiled by the agency in response to communications from the committee.
The basis of the House’s legal position is a series of D.C. Circuit cases beginning with Goland v. CIA, 607 F.2d 339 (D.C. Cir. 1978), vacated in part on other grounds, 607 F.2d 367 (D.C. Cir. 1979) (per curiam). In Goland, the court held that the transcript of a closed congressional hearing that was provided to the CIA did not thereby become an agency record for purposes of FOIA. The court relied on the fact that the congressional committee had held the hearing, which involved discussion of sensitive intelligence matters, in executive session and had marked the transcript “secret” before providing a copy to the CIA. Under these facts, the court concluded that Congress must have intended to retain control over the document and to provide it to the CIA only for internal reference purposes and as a “trustee” for Congress. To find otherwise, the court reasoned, would force Congress “either to surrender its constitutional prerogative of maintaining secrecy, or to suffer an impairment of its oversight role.”
The Goland court’s reasoning might have been limited to situations in which Congress shares executive session materials with an agency. As the court noted, “when Congress transfers secret documents to an agency, for a limited purpose and on condition of secrecy, we see no reason to think it thereby waives its own prerogative of confidentiality and resigns itself to the FOIA exemptions which bind the agency and not it.” However, in subsequent cases the D.C. Circuit recognized in principle that agency-created documents might be congressional documents if they were created or assembled in response to a congressional request and Congress manifested an intent to control the documents in question.
In 2004, the D.C. Circuit applied this principle in the context of a letter from the Joint Committee on Taxation to the Internal Revenue Service requesting certain information regarding the IRS’s auditing of tax-exempt organizations. The JCT letter concluded with the following statement: “This document is a Congressional record and is entrusted to the Internal Revenue Service for your use only. This document may not be disclosed without the prior approval of the Joint Committee.”
(Full disclosure: while at the House Counsel’s office, I advised JCT on various aspects of its position regarding the application of FOIA to its communications with executive agencies, including the use of legends such as that noted above.)
A FOIA request was made to the IRS, which declined to produce not only the JCT letter but the IRS response thereto on the grounds that they were congressional documents not subject to FOIA. After the district court ruled in the IRS’s favor, the case was appealed to the D.C. Circuit. See United We Stand America, Inc. v. IRS, 359 F.3d 595 (D.C. Cir. 2004). Quoting an earlier case, Paisley v. CIA, 712 F.2d 686, 693, 696 (D.C. Cir. 1983), the court found the controlling standard was whether there was sufficient “indicia of congressional intent” to show “Congress has manifested its own intent to retain control” of the documents in question.
Applying this standard to the facts before it, the United We Stand court concluded that “under all of the circumstances surrounding the IRS’s creation and possession of the documents, we find sufficient indicia of congressional intent to control, but only with respect to the Joint Committee’s April 28 request and those portions of the IRS response that would reveal that request.” In reaching this conclusion, the court stressed the fact that the JCT request only referred to “this document,” i.e., the request itself, rather than the IRS response thereto. The court suggested that had JCT wished to maintain control over the IRS response, it could have done so by referring to “this document and all IRS documents created in response to it.”
The House’s current position seems to be well-grounded in the language and reasoning of the D.C. Circuit’s caselaw, particularly the United We Stand decision. The government watchdog group American Oversight, in this letter to the House Counsel, contends that the House’s “sweeping and circular position appears to be a radical extrapolation from specific language in case law.” But it looks to me like the House is simply doing what the D.C. Circuit suggested it do in order to protect its oversight correspondence from FOIA.
If watchdog groups want to challenge the House’s position, they can bring cases outside the D.C. Circuit or they try to get the issue to the D.C. Circuit sitting en banc or to the Supreme Court. But under the existing case law of the D.C. Circuit, it looks like it will be an uphill climb.