FOIA Lawsuit #2 For FBN

By SteveK 

Last month it was the Treasury Department. Now Fox Business Network is suing the Fed for its “failure to release information requested under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).”

FBN filed a request for the “identification of the financial institutions receivings funds and an accounting of the collateral provided by these financial institutions between August 2007 and November 2008.”

“As a news organization, we believe in the public’s right to know and will continue in our quest to hold the government accountable for their actions on the allocation of the bailout funds,” said FBN EVP Kevin Magee in the release.

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Click continued to see the release…


FOX Business Network (FBN) filed a lawsuit against the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (the “Fed”) over its failure to release information requested under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), announced Kevin Magee, Executive Vice President, FOX News.

The initial request to the Fed, filed on November 10, 2008, sought the identification of the financial institutions receiving funds and an accounting of the collateral provided by these financial institutions between August 2007 and November 2008. In a second FOIA request, filed on November 18, 2008, FBN sought expedited processing and requested a list of financial institutions that have received lending from the Fed’s programs, the amounts borrowed and collateral pledged by each institution for the months of September and October of 2008, as well as the amount of collateral held by the Fed by close of business on November 14, 2008.

In making the announcement Magee said, “As a news organization, we believe in the public’s right to know and will continue in our quest to hold the government accountable for their actions on the allocation of the bailout funds.”

Steven Mintz, Esq., of Mintz & Gold LLP, and legal counsel for the network added, “The government has power over possibly trillions of the taxpayer’s money and the fact that they are denying requests for enhanced transparency on the distribution of those funds is appalling. Therefore, we have filed a complaint in federal court in New York and ask the Court to make the Fed provide the information sought by the journalists at FBN.”

The FOIA complaint was filed by FOX News Network, LLC, as owner of FBN. FBN filed a similar lawsuit against the United States Treasury Department on December 18, 2008 for failure to respond to repeated requests made under FOIA for data on bailout fund allocation.

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