FOIA 1

After accusing CU-Boulder and the Republican National Committee of some grand elaborate scheme to prevent students from attending the GOP debate, students who investigated these clams admit they were wrong.

The Boulder Camera reports:

 Two undergraduates who asked for all records related to the Oct. 28 debate hosted at the Coors Event Center earlier had accused the university of dragging its feet on their request, which took more than a month to fulfill, and wondered whether the university was hiding something.

What did they find?

Nothing.

The students say no red flags were in the thousands of documents turned over to them, and that the university’s hands were clearly tied when it came to the number of tickets allowed for students.

There are several lessons that should be learned by Boulder students in this exercise of Freedom of Information Act requests (FOIA).

First and foremost, don’t complain like entitled little brats about having to wait one lousy month for thousands of documents in a FOIA request. In real life, requests by the public and the press can take longer than a year to get. And if it’s a request from John Q. Public Citizen or Suzy B. Student, heavy fees can be assessed for compiling and copying documents.

Also, if students think that getting 100 tickets out of 1,000 for a debate is a conspiracy or a scandal, please don’t major in journalism.

Finally, it’s best not to publicize FOIA requests unless it’s been flatly refused or taken more than a year to complete.

Otherwise, it might come back to bite you on the rear end when you actually get the documents, and nothing’s there.