New York Times Company v. Central Intelligence Agency

In July 2017, the Washington Post published an article reporting that President Donald Trump had ended a covert program run by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) (defendant) to arm and train Syrian rebels. A few days later, Trump posted a tweet—a message on the social-media service Twitter—stating that the “Washington Post fabricated the facts on my ending massive, dangerous, and wasteful payments to Syrian rebels fighting Assad.” A day later, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Trump made a rambling statement in response to a question about whether he was disappointed with the Justice Department and attorney general. Trump said, “they should go after the leakers in intelligence.” Trump also seemed to reference the Washington Post article, indicating that “they didn’t write the truthful story, which they never do,” that a decision had been made by “people, not me,” and that whatever the Washington Post had reported “was not something that I was involved in.” Thereafter, the New York Times Company (the Times) (plaintiff) submitted a request under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to the CIA, seeking records related to the program that Trump had tweeted about. The CIA did not respond. The Times sued the CIA to obtain the documents. The CIA then issued a response stating that it could neither confirm nor deny the existence or nonexistence of responsive records because, pursuant to FOIA’s exemption 1, the existence or nonexistence of records was a classified matter—i.e., a Glomar response. The parties moved for summary judgment, supported by affidavits. Evidence supported that any substantive response to the FOIA request would be considered classified due to the matter’s nature and sensitivity. The Times argued that Trump’s statements had declassified and officially acknowledged the existence of a covert CIA program and thus the records were no longer exempt from disclosure.