Thread by @BradMossEsq

Thread

So I’ve read the new @washingtonpost story by @jennaportnoy about what happened with the SF86 of @SpanbergerVA07 and rather than resolving the issue it raises only more questions for me.

Per the USPS briefing to Hill staffers, a brand new employee with apparently

little training “mistakenly” misconstrued the request for records as if it came from Spanberger.

This raises several issues. Why was a brand new employee authorized to even process requests at all without supervision? Virtually every agency I’ve ever dealt with on FOIA

has at least one level of quality assurance review before records are released. Even a cursory review by anyone remotely competent would have recognized this was a third party request for records and that things like the SF86 should have been withheld in full. Yet the USPS

wants us to seriously believe that brand new employees operate without any of that scrutiny? If that’s true, someone at the USPS’s management level needs to be fired for sheer incompetence.

Here is another question, though. Who on earth is this brain dead USPS employee

who can’t understand the difference between a first party and third party request? Getting hired as a federal employee is no easy thing, and you have to get through at least two levels of screening before you even get to the first interview. Was USPS’ hiring staff asleep when

they hired this person?

This brings me to my last question. Why was the request ever referred to USPS corporate management in the first place? Why didn’t NPRC send it to the USPS FOIA Office where it belonged?

These questions deserve answers from USPS and NPRC. /end