A lawyer for the New York Times said Friday said the newspaper reached an agreement with the State Department to supply correspondence mentioning Hunter Biden and others tied to his business dealings.
A Friday court filing announced the development, part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit seeking the records. David McCraw, who is representing the New York Times, informed the judge that the State Department said it started identifying records as part of the request and agreed to hand over the first batch of records April 28.
McCraw, who said his letter to U.S. District Judge J. Paul Oetken was being submitted on behalf of both parties, requested to move a court date scheduled for March 17, as it “may not be necessary” given the agreement on a schedule to process the sought-after records.
“The parties are still negotiating the number of pages to be processed in and the frequency of each production. The parties respectfully propose to provide a status report to the Court on March 25, 2022, informing the Court of the results of this negotiation,” the letter reads.
The New York Times filed its lawsuit in January, accusing the State Department of failing to respond in a timely manner to two FOIA requests by reporter Kenneth Vogel to provide emails sent or received by five officials at the U.S. Embassy in Romania between August 2015 and December 2019. The agency had told the newspaper that the estimated date for responding was April 2023 at the earliest.
The records sought were those that were related to “the possible improper use of federal government resources” by private citizens and the possible evasion and nonenforcement of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Several keywords included “Hunter Biden” or “Robert H. Biden,” “Rudy Giuliani,” Trump’s former personal lawyer and New York City mayor, and “Mark Gitenstein,” U.S. ambassador to the European Union, among others.
This is an excerpt from The Washington Examiner.
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