I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the connection between FOIA and books.

Last year brought the release of my debut book, Prescription for Pain: How a Once-Promising Doctor Became the “Pill Mill Killer.” It’s a true crime story about a med-school classmate of my dad who is serving life in prison for prescription drug-dealing. And it relies on more than 15,000 pages of material that were released only after a yearslong FOIA fight against the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the agency that investigated the doctor. It may have been possible to produce a version of my book without FOIA, though it would have been a shadow of the book I was able to write. I will be eternally grateful for the law’s existence.

My book’s release was significant for me in all kinds of ways. It was the fulfilment of a lifelong dream, the culmination of more than a decade of reporting, a chance to appear on national TV, and an opportunity to meet readers in the half-dozen states – from Vermont to West Virginia to Michigan – where I’ve had events.

But it also marked my entry into an undersung branch of the literary world: a loose collection of FOIA-fueled nonfiction books that I have dubbed The FOIA Author’s Club.

This year, during Sunshine Week, I want to share why that means so much to me.

I don’t have an exact tally of books that rely on FOIA-produced documents. And given the nature of the subject matter – information that was handed over out of legal obligation, sometimes after litigation – I don’t think the government will provide one any time soon. The former U.S. Senator (and longtime FOIA champion) Patrick Leahy once wrote, “We can count on a government agency to tell us when it does something right, but we need FOIA to help tell us when it does something wrong.”

Over the years, I have identified dozens of FOIA fueled books. The law has helped to produce books on organized crime in New York, the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and FBI crackdowns on college-campus radicalism. In his 1998 book, Jackie After Jack: Portrait of the Lady, the author Christopher Anderson described the “considerable value” of FOIA-produced records from the Secret Service, NSA, and FBI. In 2001, the author Robert Stinnett went further and dedicated his entire book Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor, to the legislative father of FOIA, the late California Congressman John Moss.

From what I’ve gathered, these books tend to break down into a few sub-categories.

First, there are books that present the contents of a single FBI file. Such volumes exist for John Lennon, Frank Sinatra, and James Baldwin. In his introduction to Clayborne Carson’s 1991 book on Malcolm X’s FBI file, the director Spike Lee expressed surprise that the papers were released at all. “It’s 1991 and the Federal Bureau of Investigation we know from television and Mississippi Burning [is] far, far from reality,” he wrote. “Fortunately, there are books like this that combat these Walt Disney/John Wayne bogus images.”

Related to this category are books that use FOIA to explore the broader subject of government surveillance. This group includes Hubert Mitgang’s Dangerous Dossiers: Exposing the Secret War Against America’s Greatest Authors, Natalie Robins’s Alien Ink: The FBI’s War on Freedom of Expression, William T. Maxwell’s F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature, as well MuckRock’s wonderful trilogy of FOIA-produced anthologies about writers, scientists, and activists under surveillance.

In The File, the journalist Penn Kimball presents an indignant autobiography as a rebuke to the inaccurate biography for him he found, via a FOIA request, in government documents. In 1981, the authors Ann Mari Buitrago and Leon Andrew Immerman urged readers to request their own files, with Are You Now or Have You Ever Been in the FBI Files? How to Secure and Interpret Your FBI Files. “The existence of widespread fear of asking for files is itself strong evidence that the FBI is viewed by the American people as the nation’s secret police,” they wrote. “It was precisely to prevent the growth of such secret government that the Freedom of Information Act was enacted by Congress.”

Foreign affairs is another genre that leans heavily on documents accessed through FOIA. This category includes Stephen C. Schlesinger’s Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala, Madeleine Kalb’s The Congo Cables: The Cold War in Africa, from Eisenhower to Kennedy, Stephen G. Rabe’s The Road to OPEC: United States Relations with Venezuela, 1919-1976, and Jack Cheever’s Act of War: Lyndon Johnson, North Korea, and the Capture of the Spy Ship Pueblo.

In his 1978 book, Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia, the British historian and journalist William Shawcross wrote, “The Freedom of Information Act is a tribute to the self-confidence of American society; it recognizes rights of citizens that are hardly to be conceived anywhere else in the world.” He later told the New York Times, “It would be impossible to write this kind of book in England.”

By now perhaps you’re sensing a trend in the mood of these books. While articles about FOIA-produced documents can sometimes offer laughs – thank you, Amtrak lounge-car complaints – the books are rarely lighthearted. They tend to cover dark deeds: war, crime, coups, cults. Quite often, they expose American complicity in those deeds. In its review of Eileen Welsome’s *The Plutonium Files: America’s Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War, the Denver Postwrote, “She tracked down technical reports, talked to scientists, used a federal law called the Freedom of Information Act to ask the U.S. Energy Department for documents.” The promo materials for an updated version of John Krakauer’s, *Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillma*n note that it “includes new material obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.”

And it is among these true stories of bad behavior my book fits right in.

By 2012, I had been reporting for years on one of my dad’s med-school classmates, Paul Volkman, who was charged with a massive prescription drug-dealing scheme in Ohio in the mid 2000s. Unlike most federal criminal defendants, Volkman refused to plead guilty. And so his case proceeded to an eight-week trial in federal court in 2011. Seventy witnesses testified for the prosecution, and another ten witnesses appeared for the defense. Volkman was convicted on the majority of the charges he faced, and he was later sentenced to four consecutive life terms in prison. That’s the longest sentence given to any of the dozens of doctors who “broke bad” during the opiate epidemic.

After the trial, I accessed the transcript fairly easily. (To be clear: accessing transcripts is its own issue. See the 2015 article “You Could Buy the Tsarnaev Trial Transcript. Or You Could Buy a Range Rover.” But that’s a topic for another day.) Those 4,000-plus pages were critical for my understanding of both the trial and the underlying crimes discussed therein.

It was seeing the trial exhibits that proved difficult. During Volkman’s trial, prosecutors presented a mountain of evidence to show that, during the period in question, he had acted as a drug dealer, and not a doctor. They submitted videos and photos from inside his clinics, prescription slips, medical records, autopsy reports, slideshows comparing his prescribing to other doctors, and letters from local coroners notifying him that his patients had died. The list of exhibits was 16 pages long.

After the trial adjourned, my efforts to access those exhibits failed. Two clerks offices – at the district court and the appellate court, respectively – denied my requests. So did attorneys on either side of the case. And so did the judge, to whom I personally appealed when other attempts fell short.

It didn’t seem right that I’d need the FOIA to access evidence from a high-profile criminal trial. After all, the Sixth Amendment guarantees that “In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial…” (emphasis mine) I was only seeking documents that had already been shown in open court.

And yet, by early 2012, the FOIA seemed like my only option. And so on February 1, I sent a request to the Department of Justice, with the exhibit list (which, unlike the exhibits themselves, was accessible via PACER) attached. It was my first FOIA request, and a Facebook post I wrote at the time reflected my naivete. “Has anyone ever filed a Freedom of Information Act request?” I wrote. “Let’s talk if you have.”

I didn’t go well.

To start, it took nine months and a “review fee” of $154 for me to learn that the first DOJ sub-agency I’d sent my request – the Executive Office of U.S. Attorneys – was not its proper destination. (Of course my name was misspelled on the letter informing me of this.) In December 2012, my request was transferred to the Drug Enforcement Administration, which had investigated Volkman.

The DEA was, indeed, the proper agency to fulfil my request, but this didn’t mean that I was in for a smooth FOIA ride. Months passed between partial-fulfilment packages, which included cover letters reporting that most of what I asked for was being withheld under various exemptions. And what the DEA “released” during this achingly slow process felt like a cruel joke. Some were pages from a slideshow with all of the info redacted except Volkman’s name and the graph’s title. Others were photos with the main contents redacted or blank pages from a doctor’s notepad.

Years passed, and I still had very little of the evidence that had been presented to send a man to prison for life. At one point in this ordeal, I spoke to MuckRock for a piece titled “Phil Eil’s FOIA Nightmare.” A few months later, I wrote a letter to the House Oversight Committee in which I described my FOIA response as “the single most disillusioning experience of my life.” That quote later appeared in the Committee’s 2016 report, “FOIA is Broken.”

Eventually, after years of stonewalling, I reached out to my local ACLU, which, to its everlasting credit, saw the value of my request and the outrage of the government’s response. I was soon paired with two local pro bono attorneys and we put together a lawsuit, which we filed in federal court during Sunshine Week in 2015. The press release was titled, “ACLU Sues Drug Enforcement Agency For Public Records Local Journalist Requested 3 Years Ago.” A section of our complaint read, “To date, the DEA has withheld 11,124 pages (87.4 percent) of the 12,724 pages it has reviewed of Plaintiff Eil’s request…[while] hundreds of the 1,600 pages produced have been largely redacted, making these documents effectively no more than blank pages.”

Months of legal jousting followed. Then, in August of 2016, I got my proverbial “day in court” when lawyers on both sides of the case presented oral arguments in front of the judge. (By coincidence, the judge who presided over my FOIA case, John McConnell, is the same judge who recently ruled on the Trump administration’s funding freeze.) One month later – four and a half years after my initial request – the judge ruled in my favor.

His opinion was one of the most validating things I have ever read. Not only did he order the DEA to hand over the majority of the documents with only minor redactions, he explained why my request had merit. Citing recent high-profile crime stories like Season 1 of Serial, the Netflix series Making A Murderer that had prompted increased scrutiny of the cases they covered, he wrote, “Public access to trial materials upholds many values of our justice system.” Elsewhere, he said that the public had a proper interest in seeing where the DEA draws the line between legitimate and illegitimate prescribing of controlled substances.

McConnell also noted the disingenuousness of the DEA’s resistance to releasing this trial evidence. He pointed out that prosecutors had never asked the courts to seal the documents, had not objected to transcripts including personal information remaining available, and had uploaded unredacted exhibits to PACER during Volkman’s appeals process. In light of this lax attitude toward privacy outside my FOIA case, “It is hard to take the government’s vehement arguments asserting the strong privacy interests of the third parties here too seriously,” he wrote.

As a result of Judge McConnell’s order, the withheld records poured forth. There were video exhibits, like this video taken by DEA agents (and later shown at trial) during a raid of one of Volkman’s clinics in 2005.

There were photographs, diagrams, prescription slips, copies of patient intake forms, medical records, tax documents, handwritten price sheets from the clinic’s in-house pharmacy, patient-intake forms, and subpoenas sent to Volkman for the records of deceased patients. All told, I was given more than 15,000 pages of material.

I didn’t mention the FOIA saga much in the book I eventually wrote about Volkman. But the fruits of my lawsuit were used in hundreds of pages, especially in the longest section of the book, where I describe Volkman’s crimes and the people affected. In the end notes, I wrote, “Without question, the largest single source for this book was the record of Volkman’s criminal trial.”

Half of that record – the trial exhibits – was only accessible to me because of the FOIA.

The years I spent waiting for FOIA documents were lonely, cold, and confusing. But they did offer time – so much time – to explore whether my experiences were unique. This was when I first learned that there was a “club” to which I had, unknowingly and involuntarily, become a member.

In my research, I learned that when the Freedom of Information Act came under attack in the early 1980s, the publishing industry was among those who fought back. One bill introduced in Congress at that time proposed making the Central Intelligence Agency entirely exempt from FOIA requests. Another bill, the “Freedom of Information Improvements Act of 1981,” proposed an array of changes, including banning requests from outside the U.S., allowing agencies to charge higher fees, adding new exemptions, and expanding certain existing exemptions.

In testimony before a Senate subcommittee against the proposed changes, the Association of American Publishers named 14 recent or forthcoming books that drew on FOIA-produced documents. The subjects of those books ranged from movie star Erroll Flynn, to the Kennedy assassination, to Cold War-era nuclear arms policy, to U.S. diplomatic relations with China. Authors’ use of FOIA had sparked important debates and assisted the accountability of the CIA and FBI, the group said. And it warned that the proposed changes would usher in a “presumption of secrecy concerning an unprecedented range of important government activities.” In coverage of the testimony, Publishers Weekly noted that “several” FOIA-assisted books had been bestsellers. The proposed cuts to FOIA wouldn’t just be bad for public discourse; they’d also be also bad for business.

Thankfully, they never passed.

At other times, authors have eloquently described the law’s shortcomings. In 1981, James Reston, the author of Our Father Who Art in Hell: The Life and Death of Jim Jones, wrote an op ed for the Los Angeles Times in which he called the FOIA “a blunt tool at best,” and explained that his attempts to use it gave him more a sense of frustration than power. “I encountered massive government resistance and endless excuses rather than benign cooperation,” he wrote. “The information did not flow freely, to say the least.”

Twelve years later, the former hostage (and author of the memoir Den of Lions) Terry Anderson wrote an essay for the New York Times Magazine called “My Paper Prison” in which he explained “The Government has persistently refused me access to records and files about my capture and incarceration in Lebanon.” He said that the lack of cooperation was at times unbelievable; at other times, comical. “Like many others before me who have tried, I have found the Freedom of Information Act to be badly misnamed – a joke or an insult, I’m not sure which.”

In one of my favorite literary FOIA moments, Donald Neff, the author of 1981’s Warriors at Suez: Eisenhower Takes America Into the Middle East, used the opening pages of his book to settle some lingering FOIA grudges. “The Freedom of Information Act has received glowing compliments in recent years,” he wrote in the book’s Acknowledgements:

"...but if my experience is any guide the act has now fallen to the inroads of the censors and indifferent bureaucrats. For instance, the CIA, more than two years after my first petition, managed to produce exactly four documents from this period in which it was so active. Similarly, the State Department turned over only a modicum of information after great delay and considerable foot-dragging."

Mr. Neff, I raise my glass to you.

My favorite chronicler of the FOIA experience is Nicholson Baker, whose 2020 book Baseless: My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act, is a diary-style chronicle of his efforts to pry free information about the U.S. military’s use of biological weapons during the Korean War.

Baker offers an unforgettable description of the pace of FOIA processing: “a deliberate Pleistocenian ponderousness.” And he is equally quotable on redactions, which he calls “The black cape of ignorance” and a “form of psychological warfare directed against historians and journalists.”

Elsewhere he expresses righteous fury at the shoddy implementation of FOIA. “It’s disgraceful that in 2019, people who want to write about momentous world events – changes of government, attempted assassinations, war plans – that were discussed at the highest levels of government in 1970s, or 1960, or 1952, should have to pick through broken potsherds of redacted documents as if they were dealing with an ancient civilization,” he writes.

One section toward the end of the book bears quoting at length. “Amnesia is the CIA’s ideal – and the Air Force’s ideal,” he writes:

"That’s what I’m understanding. By controlling their own records, and purging them, and cutting all the interesting parts out of them, they are forcing a state of amnesia on a whole country – on us – so that we don’t know what we as a purportedly self-governing nation did. We can’t remember what we did….Really secrecy is about mind control…If you can suppress all knowledge of something like Operation Sphinx for decades, you allow the myth of American decency and goodness to endure. By the time the truth comes out, the shock is muffled. The outrage response is inhibited."

If I had read these words from Baker and other authors earlier in my journey, I might have been spared some of the pain of my FOIA experience. Now, after the release of my book, I’m proud to know that my fight for documents was part of a bigger struggle against what Baker calls “deliberately imposed historical amnesia.” And I take great satisfaction in assembling a list of some of my fellow FOIA-fueled titles here.

I hope that some future writer-researcher finds it, and derives motivation to keep fighting. The FOIA Author’s Club is always eager for new members.