In this week’s FOIA round-up, public records requests reveal pollution from U.S. mining sites is contaminating American water supplies without being treated, researchers use FOIA documents to reveal mishandling of fentanyl distribution by the Federal Drug Administration, and new records raise ethical concerns over travel expenses of senior advisor to Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert Wilkie.

Trump has been in office for one year, which means some of his earliest appointees will soon be free of certain promises in their ethics agreements. This week, we take a look at how you can investigate Trump appointees’ ethical obligations using public records.

In 2017, FOIA requests contributed valuable oversight to the Trump administration. If you’re wondering where to start this new year, imitating successful requests is an easy way to get the ball rolling. 2017 also yielded many repositories of calendars, travel records, ethics pledges, and other documents that you can mine for FOIA request ideas. For the first week of 2018, we rounded up resources that can springboard your efforts to FOIA the Trump administration.

In what Walter Schaub, Director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics calls “unprecedented,” released emails show the Trump transition team neglected to work with OGE prior to announcing cabinet picks.

After the Office of Government Ethics responded to Donald Trump’s announcement that he would divest from his businesses to avoid conflicts of interest as president with a series of bizarre, seemingly sarcastic tweets, the Office was inundated with reporters asking if the account had been hacked. A FOIA by CJ Ciaramella for communications surrounding the incident confirms two things – 1) the tweets were intentional, and 2) the OGE isn’t 100% sure how this Twitter thing works.