On March 15, 2022, the Department of Justice published the following: To mark the start of Sunshine Week, Attorney General Merrick B. Garland issued comprehensive new Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) guidelines today that strengthen the federal government’s commitments to transparency in government operations and the fair and effective administration of FOIA. The Attorney General’s guidelines, which were announced in a memorandum (see below), direct the heads of all executive branch departments and agencies to apply a presumption of openness in administering the FOIA and make clear that the Justice Department will not defend nondisclosure decisions that fail to do so.…
Author: John Greenewald
The purpose of this publication is to provide a reference of unclassified terms and definitions, abbreviations and acronyms without undue use of technical or scientific symbols or formulas, used within the Department of Defense (DoD) and the Department of Energy (DOE). Although I likely will never adequately explain how difficult this document was to track down, The Black Vault began the journey in August of 2014. The request was bounced around and transferred to numerous agencies, which included the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), the Department of State, the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD), the U.S. Army, the…
Bigelow Aerospace is an American aeronautics and outer space technology company which manufactures and develops expandable space station modules. Bigelow Aerospace was founded by Robert Bigelow in 1998, and is based in North Las Vegas, Nevada. It is funded in large part by the profit Bigelow gained through his ownership of the hotel chain, Budget Suites of America. The below are the only files that come up when seeking FBI records on Bigelow Aerospace, or one of its subsidiaries, Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies (or BAASS). Oddly, this specific request below was for BAASS records, but only after a December…
NOTE: Since this article was written, additional documents have been released that reveal more of the story. Those are linked at the end of this article with an additional link to a thread on the social media X which outlines some of them. When Luis Elizondo was introduced to the world in October of 2017 shortly after his retirement from working inside the Pentagon, it is likely no one quite realized the full extent of the story that would unfold. Although Elizondo’s claims seemed extraordinary at the time; they were entirely believable to those that heard them. And as a…
After many denials over the years through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and after a Mandatory Declassification Review case was rejected (for an unclear reason) to get this material, The Black Vault filed a FOIA request to get the “photographs and videos of the wreckage of United Flight 93, taken on or around September 11, 2001” released to the public. That case was filed in December of 2021, and on February 14, 2022, the FBI responded by denying all of the records as being “exempt from disclosure.” The full FOIA response is below.