Nine Years After Request for FEMA Katrina Records: Nothing

The sleuths at the Project on Government Oversight, a nonprofit watchdog group, put in a Freedom of Information Act request back in August 2006 for ethics and conflict-of-interest documents that might reveal hanky-panky with billions of dollars in Hurricane Katrina recovery contracts.

They were especially interested in documents related to top Federal Emergency Management Agency official Daniel A. Craig and The Shaw Group, which got a sole-source, noncompetitive contract.

FEMA and its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, took nine years to give POGO nothing. In December 2015, DHS finally wrote POGO to say that disclosing the records would constitute an "unwarranted invasion of privacy."

• "DHS Took 9 Years to Reject FOIA Request for Katrina Records," POGO Blog, March 18, 2016, by Daniel Van Schooten.