FOIAengine: A Paper Trail of Forewarnings
When the Justice Department unsealed its indictment of John R. Bolton two weeks ago, it wasn’t the first time his name had surfaced in government files.
Long before prosecutors accused the former national security adviser and Donald Trump nemesis of mishandling classified information, Bolton had already become the subject of a flurry of Freedom of Information Act requests — filings that hinted at the controversies still shadowing him years after he left the White House.
Unnamed requesters as well as the corporate intermediary Cogency Global sought records about Bolton’s behind-the-scenes diplomacy and dealings: his contacts with Attorney General William Barr, his efforts to block a Chinese takeover of a Ukrainian aerospace firm, even the government’s internal emails about a Justice Department tweet disparaging Bolton in 2020.
Now, in the wake of Bolton’s indictment, those FOIA requests – at least 10 found in PoliScio Analytics’ competitive-intelligence database FOIAengine, which tracks FOIA requests in as close to real-time as their availability allows – read like a paper trail of forewarnings.
FOIA requests to the federal government can be an important early warning of bad publicity, litigation to come, or uncertainties to be hedged and gamed out. In Bolton’s case, the requests illustrate how his actions drew scrutiny years before the Trump Justice Department lowered the boom.
The set-up for all this came when Bolton, the hawkish White House national security adviser during Trump’s first term, resigned – or, in Trump’s telling, was fired – on September 10, 2019. Whichever it was, there was no doubting that the two had a bitter falling out. Within a day, Bolton’s D.C.-based literary agents were shopping his tell-all book, The Room Where It Happened. The book would become a huge success the following year, a must-buy (if not a must-read) for the Washington cognoscenti during the early days of the Covid lockdown. Estimates put his royalties at $2 million or more.
But the path to publication was rocky.
Shortly before the book’s 2020 release, Bolton became the target of a Trump Administration civil lawsuit that quickly turned into a First Amendment cause célèbre. Trump’s Justice Department sought to stop the book’s publication on national security grounds.
Media organizations weighed in to support Bolton, who asserted he hadn’t violated his White House vow to protect national secrets. Amicus briefs came in from Dow Jones, publisher of the Wall Street Journal, as well as from a mélange of other freedom-of-the-press petitioners who typically wouldn’t support a polarizing national security hawk long identified with the right: the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press; PEN; the Washington Post; the New York Times; and the ACLU. (In a later review, the Times trashed Bolton’s book as “bloated with self-importance . . . exceedingly tedious and slightly unhinged.”)
Although the Biden Administration dropped the civil lawsuit against Bolton in mid-2021, Bolton still had ample reason to be concerned. He had learned months before that his personal emails had been hacked by someone associated with the government of Iran. “A representative for Bolton notified the U.S. government of the hack in or about July 2021, but did not tell the U.S. government that the account contained national defense information, including classified information, that Bolton had placed in the account from his time as national security adviser,” according to the indictment filed this month.
The hacker taunted Bolton. A message on July 25, 2021 warned, “This could be the biggest scandal since Hillary’s emails were leaked, but this time on the GOP side! Contact me before it’s too late.” A representative for Bolton forwarded the email to the F.B.I.
Whether by coincidence or not, soon after the Iranian hack, Cogency Global jumped into the mix with a detailed FOIA request to the Department of Defense, name-checking Bolton. The company, with offices worldwide, specializes in public-records retrieval, often acting as a proxy filer for corporate and legal clients who want to keep their names out of FOIA correspondence. Over the past four years, FOIAengine has documented more than 700 federal FOIA requests filed by Cogency Global.
In this case, an anonymous requester and possible party in interest was using Cogency Global to seek records connecting Bolton to a sensitive drama of Trump’s first term: the blocked sale of Ukraine’s Motor Sich aerospace company to Chinese investors. Citing news reports from the Wall Street Journal, Time, and the Kyiv Post, Cogency asked for internal Pentagon documents on the U.S. government’s role in opposing the deal; on visits by U.S. officials to Motor Sich’s factory in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine; and on any communications involving Trump protégé Erik Prince, the Blackwater founder and private-security entrepreneur, who was said to have explored a Western-backed bid for the Ukrainian company.
At the heart of Cogency Global’s request was a telling quotation: Bill Taylor, the U.S. chargé d’affaires to Ukraine, had told a Ukrainian newspaper that “John Bolton energized the interest in this question.” That line suggested the former national security adviser had done more than merely warn Kyiv against selling jet-engine technology to China, but instead had actively encouraged the search for an American alternative buyer. Cogency Global did not respond to a request for comment on whom it was representing, or what documents, if any, were obtained.
The Chinese efforts to acquire Motor Sich were ultimately blocked by Ukraine for national security reasons. This led to a legal battle and the company’s subsequent nationalization. In response to being blocked, Chinese company Beijing Skyrizon initiated an international arbitration case in 2020 against Ukraine, seeking at least $3.5 billion in compensation. Five years later, the arbitration is still pending.
Since then, Russia’s war against Ukraine has left Motor Sich, once one of the world’s premier aircraft-engine manufacturers, in shambles—its facilities repeatedly hit by Russian strikes and its production sharply curtailed under wartime control.
Bolton, meanwhile, is next scheduled to appear in federal court in Maryland with his lawyer, Abbe Lowell, for a status conference on November 21. Under criminal indictment for mishandling national defense information and having surrendered his passport, Bolton faces a penalty of 10 years in prison for each of the 18 felony counts. He has pleaded not guilty.
FOIAengine is the only source for the most comprehensive, fully searchable archive of FOIA requests across over 40 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. Learn more about FOIAengine here. Sign up here to become a trial user of FOIAengine.
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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].
