FBI must pay S.F. journalist $470,000 (Seth Rosenfeld, whose FOIA requests were denied)
A federal judge this week ordered the FBI to pay a San Francisco journalist almost half a million dollars for withholding records he requested under the Freedom of Information Act.
Seth Rosenfeld, a former reporter at The Chronicle and the San Francisco Examiner, won $470,459 in attorneys' fees for two lawsuits he filed - one in 1990 and another in 2007 - while researching the 1960s protest movement in Berkeley.
The lawsuits were two of five he filed against the FBI and the Justice Department starting in 1985. He requested a variety of records pertaining to the FBI's covert operations at UC Berkeley and its secret relationship with former President Ronald Reagan.
Rosenfeld used the information he received from the FBI in articles for The Chronicle and the Examiner, as well as in his book "Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals, and Reagan's Rise to Power," which was released in August.
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U.S. District Judge Edward Chen found in his ruling Wednesday that Rosenfeld was "largely the prevailing party" in the suits. Throughout the litigation, Chen said, the court found that the FBI did not adequately search for many of the requested documents.
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