This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, February 7th, 2024.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The FBI has given up a heavily redacted list of its most frequent requesters of information under the Freedom of

Information Act. This list is referred to internally at the FBI as the Vexumfiler list.

One name on that list stands out, the Cato Institute. And it stands out in part

because the other names on the list are redacted. Much of the information requested by Cato

is part of the work of Cato's Patrick Eddington.

We discussed how Cato landed this dubious distinction earlier today.

Pat, highly selective transparency, seems like it's not really transparency but in this one case I had

to talk to you because any time a federal police agency or intelligence agency has a problem with the Cato Institute,

it's usually something you did.

We have succeeded in achieving here at the Institute the coveted title of Vexum Freedom of Information Act filer

with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

It is our first time on the list.

The list has been around for a long time and we found out about

this literally just last night when our colleague Emily Adamick had noticed on Twitter that my friend John Greenwald, who is the creator of what's

known as the Black Vault, which is one of the best FOIA resources on the entire web made public the latest so-called FBI

vexifiler list and this one was highly redacted in comparison to the one that was put out in 2016 where they had a list of a

number of individuals to include, let's say, Ken Klippenstein, who's now at the

Internet or the Intercept, and a number of folks around town here in DC and

elsewhere in the country who I also know Trevor Griffey out on the West Coast

and some others but this time it was just a very short one page kind of thing and everything was redacted except

...