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Thank you, Emma! I really appreciate it!! 🙏🙏

Hit the link to check out this week's edition of FOIA Files and please subscribe so you don't miss an issue! And coming Tuesday: another episode of my new FOIA podcast, Disclosure! I’ll give you a three word preview: White House toilets.

www.bloomberg.com/news/newslet...

The documents say that OCDETF began to wind down its operations in June. The unit’s various responsibilities, including “5,000 existing OCDETF cases,” were then to be transferred, by Sept. 30, to a new set of task forces under DHS. That transition is now largely complete.

I filed a couple of follow up FOIA requests over the summer. And although I received fewer than a dozen docs, the emails and letters made it official: OCDETF as it was known no longer exists. Or as the documents put it, the program was “sunsetting.”

In April, the acting director of OCDETF, Thomas Padden, had been told by other officials at DOJ that the group’s fiscal year 2026 budget would be zeroed out by Sept. 30 and the task forces would cease to exist.

This week, I’m breaking out some docs that serve as a follow-up to a story I broke earlier this year (thanks to docs I obtained via #FOIA) about the Trump admin's dissolution of the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces, a DOJ unit that combats transnational crime networks & drug cartels

Please listen and subscribe! Every week, Matt and I will take you on a wild ride through the #FOIA trenches. New episodes are available every Tuesday on all major podcast platforms or wherever you listen.

From @bloomberg.com and No Smiling

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Episode 1 is up now and it's all about the Russia documents we pried loose from Trump's first term. Subscribers get access to Episode 2, which is a really great one about Fed Chairman Jerome Powell being duped by Russian pranksters

Good call! I will!

“Again, I consulted with the Justice Department’s Money Laundering Section about my analysis before expanding that scope. The duty attorney agreed with my analysis.”

“You also accuse me of ‘broaden[ing] the scope of the investigation without any foundation for doing so by adding charges of money laundering and violations of a money transmitting business to the investigation,’” she wrote to Lefkowitz

Villafaña wrote that she prepared an analysis of Epstein’s alleged money laundering and ran it by the duty attorney at DOJ’s Asset Forfeiture and Money Laundering Section before she launched the investigation.