Jul 25, 2012 No Comments ›› Toro520
Lost amid the hilarity of watching Senator Dianne Feinstein do a Cory Booker impersonation by denying she meant what she said about White House leaks was another, and perhaps more significant, retraction. The Department of Justice had to file a motion admitting that the CIA had found numerous documents that should have been released in a Freedom of Information Act request from Judicial Watch about White House interaction with filmmakers producing a movie about the killing of Osama bin Laden:
The Central Intelligence Agency recently discovered a “4 to 5 inch stack” of documents that relate to the spy agency’s cooperation with the makers of a forthcoming Hollywood film on the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, according to a new court filing.
The documents about CIA dealings with the film now titled “Zero Dark Thirty” were “inadvertently overlooked” in response to a Freedom of Information Act request and lawsuit filed by the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch, Justice Department attorneys said in a motion filed in federal court in Washington Tuesday afternoon (posted here).
“The CIA discovered a 4 to 5 inch stack of records potentially responsive to plaintiff’s FOIA request that had been inadvertently overlooked during the CIA’s search,” Civil Division attorney Marcia Berman wrote. “The CIA is continuing to look into the circumstances of the discovery of the new documents to ensure the adequacy of its search.”
Well … oopsie! This relates directly to the issue around which Feinstein danced yesterday, which is the intentional leaking of national-security information to burnish the reputation of Barack Obama. Judicial Watch sued for documentation that related to official contacts between the administration and the filmmakers, as speculation grew that not only did the White House give unprecedented access in order to make itself look good in the cinema, but that the access would allow the film to get released before the election. (The filmmakers pushed the release date back after the controversy erupted.)
We’ll have to see whether Judicial Watch gets any answers from these documents, assuming they do get released. It’s pretty certain that JW won’t do a Cory Booker impression, though.
