A year and nearly 2,000 pages of documents later, a group suing to expose what the Division of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was doing at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) says the agency withheld relevant documents “in bad faith” and is asking the court to allow discovery and depositions to extract the information.
“So far, defendants have sought to delay document production, and when pressed by this Court to act, defendants have produced only sanitized email threads,” attorney Arthur Belendiuk of the advocacy group Frequency Forward and journalist Nina Burley, who together filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for the FCC documents, wrote in a new filing with the court. “The evidence clearly demonstrates that the FCC acted in bad faith by withholding documents responsive to plaintiffs’ FOIA request.”
Frequency Forward and Burleigh claim that the FCC failed to produce documents that would have been responsive to their FOIA request, which was intended to shed light on any potential conflicts of interest between DOGE and billionaire Elon Musk’s role as the public face of the FCC, which controls his company SpaceX. The group asked the FCC to produce documents related to FCC Chairman Brendan Carr’s visits to Musk-affiliated facilities, but in the filing, they said the agency failed to do so, even for visits about which Carr had posted publicly online. Frequency Forward identified eight posts made by Carr on X within the period of the request for documents that show him visiting a SpaceX or Tesla facility. Yet, the group says, the agency did not submit any documentation to Carr’s office regarding planning of the trips, or even an itinerary or calendar schedule.
“The evidence clearly demonstrates that the FCC acted in bad faith.”
Burleigh and the frequency forwarder say it is “vital” that they get this information. “[T]”The FCC has refused to consider, on the one hand, Musk’s role as a super contributor to the Republican Party, his role as head of DOGE, and, on the other hand, his control over SpaceX as an FCC regulated entity as a conflict of interest,” Belendiuk wrote in the filing. Providing a detailed description of DOGE’s contacts with Musk, his companies, and the FCC would give the public a better understanding of the issues raised by such a relationship.
The only email from Carr in the entire production is completely redacted, and it is a candid response to how the agency should respond to a variety of press requests, including one from Carr. The Verge About DOGE employees found in its staff directory. Frequency Forward says the FCC did not provide any text messages responsive to the FOIA request, or identify their existence with an explanation as to why they could not be made public, even though some emails exchanged public reference text. The FCC did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the filing.
The group also accused the FCC of omitting key details about the involvement of DOGE employees at the agency. For example, Tarak Makecha, a DOGE detailer in the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), apparently spent two weeks at the FCC, and requested and sometimes obtained “substantial amounts of information from Commission staff, including broadband mapping data and detailed personnel records regarding Commission staff,” according to the filing. “However, there is no evidence that Makecha was ever actually ‘involved’ in the Commission or cleared the necessary security or ethics checks before receiving such information.” And although Mecha indicated in public financial disclosure forms that he owned stock in Tesla, Disney and a telecommunications portfolio, the agency did not produce any documents discussing his ethics clearance or agreements to recuse himself on certain matters.
“Who leaves a federal position as soon as they start after being asked for sensitive agency data, and why is the paperwork so thin?”. Belendiuk asked in a statement The Verge. “If the Commission wants the public to believe this was routine, it should be able to produce routine onboarding, ethics and clearance records. Instead, those records are missing or fragmented, and what we’ve seen raises more questions than it answers.”
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