In this week’s FOIA roundup, records reveal that taxpayers paid for a Mar-a-Lago liquor bill, USA TODAY starts a national police misconduct records database, and the D.C. Metro is sued over customer satisfaction survey records.

See a great use of public records we missed? Send over your favorite FOIA stories via email, on Twitter, or on Facebook, and maybe we’ll include them in the next round-up. And if you’d like even more inspiration, read past round-ups.

Taxpayers paid a $1,000 bar tab for Trump and company

Records obtained by Property of the People in collaboration with ProPublica and covered by WNYC as part of their “Trump, Inc.” series revealed that taxpayers covered a $1,000 Mar-a-Lago bar tab that Trump, White House administrators, President Xi Jinping, and the Chinese delegation racked up in April 2017. Along with the $1,000 liquor bill, the State Department negotiated with the Trump Organization to get a 10% discount at Mar-a-Lago and applied for a Citibank travel card to use exclusively for Mar-a-Lago visits.

Read more about the bar tab here, or listen to the corresponding Trump, Inc. episode here.

USA TODAY publishes database of police misconduct records

USA TODAY, its affiliated newsrooms, and the Invisible Institute in Chicago have compiled a national database of police misconduct records. Through the public records requests that have been filed so far, approximately 85,000 police officers were revealed to have been under investigation for misconduct. The data also highlighted that the majority of decertified police officers are banned for drug and alcohol related offenses, along with assaults and violence. Due to the internal, mostly unregulated structure of police misconduct investigations, some records are incomplete or missing.

Read more about the new database and comb through the records here.

D.C. Metro sued over public records request

The group Unsuck DC Metro and Judicial Watch are suing the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (often referred to as “the Metro”) after the agency refused to release customer satisfaction survey records. Alongside withholding the majority of the documents, the Metro charged Unsuck DC Metro $324.17 for a documents release that only had one of 29 pages unredacted. The Metro also stated that if Unsuck DC Metro didn’t pay the $324.17 fee, two pending records requests would not receive a response.

Read more about Unsuck DC Metro and Judicial Watch’s lawsuit over at the Washington Post.

Read a great FOIA-based news story we should highlight? Let us know and maybe we can include it in our next roundup! Send it over via email, on Twitter, or on Facebook.

Image via Wikimedia Commons