An advocacy group is seeking to collect documents it claims the FCC has wrongfully kept private. A year and nearly 2,000 pages of documents later, a group filing a lawsuit to uncover what the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) did to the Federal Communications Commission claims the agency has withheld relevant documents 'in bad faith' and is asking the court to allow discovery and depositions to reveal the information.
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“To date, Defendant has sought to delay the production of documents, and when pressed by this Court to act, Defendant has produced only sanitized email threads,” wrote Arthur Belendiuk, attorney for advocacy group Frequency Forward and journalist Nina Burleigh, in a new court filing. “The evidence clearly shows that the FCC has acted in bad faith in withholding documents that respond to Plaintiffs’ FOIA request.”
Frequency Forward and Burleigh allege that the committee failed to produce documents in response to their FOIA request, which was intended to shed light on any potential conflict of interest between billionaire Elon Musk’s role as a public figure for DOGE and the FCC, which regulates his company SpaceX. The group asked the committee to produce documents about FCC Chairman Brendan Carr’s to facilities linked to Musk, but they say the agency failed to do so, even for trips that Carr had publicly posted online.
Frequency Forward found eight posts Carr made on X during the period of their document request, showing him visiting what appears to be either a SpaceX or Tesla facility. However, the group says the service produced no documents about the travel planning from Carr’s office, not even a travel itinerary or calendar event.
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Burleigh and Frequency Forward say it is “critical” to obtain this information. “[The] FCC has refused to consider the conflict of interest created by, on the one hand, Musk’s role as a major contributor to the Republican Party, his role as head of DOGE, and, on the other, his control of SpaceX as an FCC-regulated entity,” Belendiuk writes in the filing.
“Providing a detailed record of Musk, his companies, and DOGE's contacts with the FCC will provide the public with a better understanding of the issues raised by such a relationship.“
The only email in the entire production from Carr himself is fully redacted and is ostensibly a response to how the service should respond to various press inquiries, including one from The Verge regarding DOGE employees found on its staff directory.
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The FCC did not produce any text messages in response to the FOIA request, nor did it acknowledge their existence with an explanation for why they could not be released, Frequency Forward says, even though some of the released emails refer to text exchanges.
