During the Department’s Sunshine Week Celebration, Attorney General Holder announced that the department:

“Will begin posting monthly FOIA logs for requests made to my office, the offices of the Deputy Attorney General, the Associate Attorney General, and other senior leadership offices.  These logs will publicly identify the subject matter and disposition of each request – bringing greater transparency to the FOIA process and making it easier for people to located information that may be of interest to them.”

Today we launched this initiative, which was also noted in the Department’s Open Government Plan version 2.0, by posting in our FOIA Library the FOIA logs for January, February, March, and April 2012, listing the FOIA requests closed during these months by our office. 

The monthly logs list requests processed by OIP, which include requests sent to the department’s senior leadership offices as noted by the Attorney General, in addition to the Offices of Legislative Affairs, Legal Policy, Public Affairs, Intergovernmental and Public Liaison (now a part of the Office of Legislative Affairs), as well as requests for OIP’s own records.

For each entry, these FOIA logs provide:

• the request number;
• the date the request was closed;
• a description of the records sought;
• the disposition of the request (how it was closed); and
• a listing, and description, of any FOIA exemption applied to the request

Logs are posted as both PDFs and as open format CSV files.  In order to provide as much information as possible with these monthly postings, these logs do not contain entries for requests made by individuals for records on themselves.

By posting these logs, you can easily identify previously processed records that are of interest and gain insight into the FOIA operations at the Justice Department.

You can view all of the posted monthly FOIA logs, as well as other documents made available by OIP, here.