Two
investigative journalists are suing the FBI after the government failed to
respond on time to a pair of Freedom of Information Act requests filed for
details on the death of reporter Michael Hastings.
Jason Leopold and Ryan Shapiro filed a joint suit on Friday after
the Federal Bureau of Investigation neglected to respond to their FOIA requests
within the 20-working day period required by law.
Leopold and Shapiro both sent FOIA requests to the FBI following
Hastings’ untimely death last month, and are now taking legal action in an
attempt to expedite pleas that have so far been ignored by the bureau.
Hastings,
33, died last month in Los Angeles, California after his Mercedes C250 Coupé crashed at a high rate of speed in the early
morning hours of June 18. Hastings was widely-respected for his hard-hitting
brand of national security reporting with outlets ranging from Rolling Stone to
Buzzfeed.com, and has been credited with causing the resignation of Stanley
McChrystal, the four-star general who headed NATO's International Security
Assistance Force in Afghanistan until a Hastings-penned expose in 2010
embarrassed him to the point of abandoning that role.
According
to a friend, Hastings warned his
colleagues over email just
hours before his death that he was working on a big story and that the FBI
would likely be investigating his associates.
“It alarmed me very much,” Staff Sgt. Joseph Biggs, a
friend of Hastings, said of the email he received last month. “I just said it
doesn’t seem like him. I don’t know, I just had this gut feeling and it just
really bothered me,” he told KTLA News.
The anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks also claimed that Hastings made
contact with an attorney for the group the night before his fatal car-crash,
furthering speculation that he sought protection from a potential government
investigation.
But now more than one
month after Hastings passed away, little remains known about the night of the
accident or what kind of investigation, if any, occurred in the days and weeks
before the crash, which only further fueled the flames of conspiracy theories that developed in the wake of the accident. The FBI has formally
denounced reports that it was involved in a probe focusing on Hastings, but
Leopold and Shapiro still insist the government handle the FOIA request, which
it was obligated to address after the 20-day mark passed earlier this month.
In a statement published by
the Freedom of the
Press Foundation, Leopold and Shapiro say they’ve retained attorney
Jeffrey Light, who in turn filed the motion for summary judgment seeking
expedited processing of the federal complaint last week.
"By suing the FBI for failure to comply with the Freedom
of Information Act, [we] hope to obtain records pertaining both to the unusual
circumstances of Michael Hastings's death and to the broader issue of FBI
surveillance of journalists and other critics of American national security
policy," Shapiro said.
“Perhaps the FBI doesn't have any records on Hastings,”
wrote Leopold. “Regardless, I think Hastings would appreciate that Shapiro
and I are trying to find out whether that is truly the case.”
Source: RT News
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