FOIAengine: How a Proxy Requester Masks Its Identity
On April 14, 2021, online forums where retail investors and short sellers exchange research, rumors, and trading strategies were buzzing.
On Reddit and Twitter, meme stock traders were watching for the next big short. Chatter was building about the activist short seller Culper Research. An imminent short-selling attack on telehealth company LifeMD (NASD: LFMD) was the rumor du jour.
An anonymous Reddit user going by the first name Tooch -– with a last name that forms a cheeky double entendre –- posted about Culper that day on the r/LFMD subreddit, the virtual town square for traders watching $LFMD. Tooch’s post was titled “Some research into Culper Research.”
“As we all learned today,” Tooch began, “Culper and its shady supporters aim to create a veil of legitimate entities conducting research, which just so happens to uncover some form of fraud/scandal/etc. In reality, they are simply conspiring to drive down the prices of stocks they take short positions in. . . . A quick scroll through Culper’s website yields very little in the way of personnel or address. I did some deeper digging though using SEC FOIA request logs and Culper’s own posts on twitter in an attempt to pull back the curtain a bit. I’d love to hear your thoughts on what I’ve found below and hopefully help connect some of these dots.”
The dots led somewhere interesting. On Twitter, whoever was behind Culper Research’s Twitter feed was posting screenshots of Freedom of Information Act responses from the Securities and Exchange Commission. The screenshots displayed images of SEC FOIA-denial letters pertaining to different companies, always with the identity of the requester blacked out.
In each instance, the SEC based its denials on FOIA Exemption 7(B) – denoting an active law enforcement investigation. Lest anyone miss the inference to be drawn, the various blurbs from Culper name checked the companies and spelled it right out: “A recent FOIA request suggests that the company is under an active SEC investigation,” said one post. “FOIA requests suggest [the company] is under an active SEC investigation,” said another.
The evidence ostensibly was right there, in the SEC’s own words: A bunch of FOIA denials, each creating the inference of corporate wrongdoing and legal jeopardy by a company the activist short seller was targeting. Although the identity of the original requester was a mystery, one thing was clear: Culper’s involvement couldn’t be traced.
At least, not easily.
Earlier, Culper had posted on Twitter the images of two FOIA responses from the SEC about CytoDyn (NASD: CYDY), a once high-flying pharma company that Culper had already targeted. The heading on the Twitter post included the words “under an active SEC investigation.”
Like all the others, those two screenshots had the recipient’s information blacked out. This sent the anonymous Reddit poster Tooch back to the SEC’s FOIA logs, to see who might have been behind the original requests.
In the SEC’s logs, there was no FOIA request listed either from Culper or the person behind Culper, Christian Lamarco. The only requests about CytoDyn had come instead from an investment adviser in San Francisco. But the dates on the imaged SEC letters matched the request dates in the SEC’s logs, so it was obvious that information sharing was going on.
In the same post, Tooch cited a similar 7(B) Culper tweet about OrthoPediatrics (NASD: KIDS). Again, the tweet used a screen shot of an SEC 7(B) denial letter (“a recent FOIA request suggests that the company is under an active SEC investigation”), implying negative news for OrthoPediatrics. But, also again, the requester’s information was blacked out.
By tracing back to the SEC’s FOIA logs for requests about OrthoPediatrics, it soon became clear to Tooch that the FOIA request referenced in the screenshot came from someone identified as “Jeff Bourland.” Bourland, whoever he was, had shared the 7(B) document with Culper. Culper, meanwhile, had already launched a short-selling attack on OrthoPediatrics.
And Tooch had seen exactly the same thing happening just one day earlier. Culper tweeted a screen shot –the requester’s identity was blacked out as usual – of an SEC 7(B) letter implying a federal investigation into SOS Ltd. (NYSE: SOS), a holding company involved in various businesses including commodity trading and cryptocurrency mining. The heading on this one: “FOIA requests suggest SOS Ltd $SOS is under an active SEC investigation.” Culper clearly had the letter, and already had a short-selling attack going on. The 7(B) letter would juice the short. But, based on the SEC’s FOIA logs, the request hadn’t come from Culper.
It came from “Jeff Bourland.”
To the Reddit commenter, all this was curious. “At this point,” Tooch posted, “the connection between all these entities is unclear. . . . I’m hoping one of you all much smarter people could help here and maybe start to connect some of these dots to pull down the veil a bit from these shady scumbags. It is very clear that one of their tactics is to submit FOIA requests for information regarding investigations into companies they are attacking, which if you know the Freedom of Information Act, is information that would never be released to the public. However, the language in the response letter uses terms like ‘we are withholding documents that may be responsive’ which Culper and Co. are using to lead investors to the conclusion that such records do in fact exist and that an investigation into likely what Culper just detailed in their ‘report’ is ongoing. Just another manipulative scare tactic that I wouldn’t be surprised if they use against LifeMD next.”
That was a bullseye. Later that day, Culper Research mounted its short-selling attack on LifeMD (NASD: LFMD). The stock got crushed, dropping from a high of $31 a share to around $7.50 in a matter of days; in the months that followed, it fell to below $1 before recovering somewhat. LifeMD sued Culper Research and Lamarco. Culper’s report and tweets about LifeMD have since been taken down, likely as part of a settlement.
We’re always interested in FOIA requests from activist short sellers, because they’re often signals of attacks to come. PoliScio Analytics’ competitive-intelligence database FOIAengine, which tracks FOIA requests in as close to real-time as their availability allows, is all about the signals that such FOIA requests generate.
When the 2021 thread from Reddit came to our attention, following our recent article about Culper Research (“Short Sellers Target Zeta Global, and a Private Eye Jumps In”), we decided to dig deeper into who was making those FOIA requests on behalf of Culper. Like Tooch, the poster on Reddit, we were interested to know more about the aforementioned Jeff Bourland and what his connection might be to Culper Research.
Bourland shows up in FOIAengine as the originator of 14 requests since 2021, all to the SEC, with the most recent on April 26, 2024. During that same time he’s been the target of eight FOIA requests in total, to the SEC and the Food and Drug Administration.
None of the requests provide Bourland’s organizational affiliation. But earlier requests to the FDA, in 2019 and 2020, provide clues – and may answer the question that was dogging the Reddit commenter Tooch about how Culper Research obtained those 7(B) letters signaling investigations.
An April 6, 2020 request to the FDA that came from Shadyside Partners LLC – the corporate entity behind Culper Research – was signed by someone calling himself Jeff Borland, according to FDA documents provided to us. On the FDA’s FOIA portal, the person identified as Borland entered a mobile phone number that, according to public records, still belongs to Christian Lamarco, along with a bogus street address in the non-existent town of Pittsburgh, Illinois. The address used a zip code from Chicago, where recent court records say Christian Lamarco now resides. The email address that “Borland” provided mapped back to Shadyside Partners and used Lamarco’s initials, “CL.”
The putative Borland’s request sought “copies of all emergency investigational new drug files granted to CytoDyn, Inc.’s drug Leronlimab in relation to treatment of patients with Covid-19.”
But who was really behind that request?
Two months earlier, Lamarco had ripped into CytoDyn and started a short-selling frenzy in the stock. Lamarco called CytoDyn a fraud that was “kept alive by CEO Nader Pourhassan, a two-time felon who has moved on from selling falsely labeled Native American dreamcatchers to selling grossly inflated CytoDyn shares to unsuspecting minority shareholders.”
Lamarco was on to something. Last December, CytoDyn’s ex-CEO Pourhassan, 62 years old, was convicted in federal court of four counts of securities fraud, two counts of wire fraud, and three counts of insider trading. He faces up to 20 years in prison. Sentencing is scheduled for September 24.
The detailed back-up for two other 2019 requests to the FDA that listed Borland as the requester also showed Lamarco’s mobile number, but with addresses in two different cities and states. Those requests sought information about Bausch Health and ImprimisRx – two companies that, so far, haven’t been hit with a short attack by Lamarco.
We reached out to Lamarco via Culper Research’s website to ask him, among other things, for an introduction to “Jeff Bourland.” We didn’t hear back.
Federal agencies juggling thousands of FOIA requests take the information and contact details entered by requesters at face value and process the requests accordingly. The use of FOIA proxy requesters is common and well known. In a few weeks, we plan to return to this subject, describing some of the FOIA requests made by investigators and private detectives on behalf of other parties – including short sellers and companies they target – who don’t want their identities, or their quarry, revealed.
FOIAengine access now is available for all professional members of Investigative Reporters and Editors, a non-profit organization dedicated to improving the quality of journalism. IRE is the world’s oldest and largest association of investigative journalists. Following the federal government’s shutdown of FOIAonline.gov last year, FOIAengine is the only source for the most comprehensive, fully searchable archive of FOIA requests across dozens of federal departments and agencies. FOIAengine has more robust functionality and searching capabilities, and standardizes data from different agencies to make it easier to work with. PoliScio Analytics is proud to be partnering with IRE to provide this valuable content to investigative reporters worldwide.
To see all the requests mentioned in this article, log in or sign up to become a FOIAengine user.
Next: Hedge fund requests to the FDA, SEC, FTC, and other agencies.
John A. Jenkins, co-creator of FOIAengine, is a Washington journalist and publisher whose work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, GQ, and elsewhere. He is a four-time recipient of the American Bar Association’s Gavel Award Certificate of Merit for his legal reporting and analysis. His most recent book is The Partisan: The Life of William Rehnquist. Jenkins founded Law Street Media in 2013. Prior to that, he was President of CQ Press, the textbook and reference publishing enterprise of Congressional Quarterly. FOIAengine is a product of PoliScio Analytics (PoliScio.com), a new venture specializing in U.S. political and governmental research, co-founded by Jenkins and Washington lawyer Randy Miller. Learn more about FOIAengine here. To review FOIA requests mentioned in this article, subscribe to FOIAengine.
Write to John A. Jenkins at [email protected].
