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If there were no investigation, they couldn't legally use that FOIA rejection reason. They'd have to give a different reason.

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The question itself presupposes that there is an investigation, so they are essentially saying that if there were such materials it would be covered by that reason.

FOIA would be abused like crazy to unearth classified information if this method of questioning worked

Have you ever filed a FOIA request? I guess not.

Denials for outright false reasons are the norm, responses routinely take 10x longer than legally allowed. Just go browse muckrock for a while to see what a mess it is.

Why does this get downvotes? It's simply how things are, FOIA is a rather adversarial process. If you spend any time on muckrock you will see that only a very small % of requests actually get serious replies from the government, more often the responses seem like straight up trolling "Hey, we were supposed to reply to you 2 years ago but didn't feel like it. Are you still interested in this request?"

For example, look at some of these requests pending (since 2019) with various agencies: https://www.muckrock.com/foi/multirequest/foia-outliers-queu...

Most of the replies are clownish at best.

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