FOIAengine: Hundreds of Requests Targeted Biden Connections at Center for American Progress
Months before Donald Trump threatened the Center for American Progress, the influential progressive policy organization, with a $5 billion defamation lawsuit, conservative investigators from the Heritage Foundation and its offshoots were quietly using the Freedom of Information Act to assemble an extensive documentary record of the liberal think tank’s leaders and their activities in the Biden Administration.
Hundreds of Heritage FOIA requests sought emails, text messages, calendars, meeting records, and other communications involving CAP officials, board members and financial supporters during the Biden presidency. Those targeted included CAP president Neera Tanden; chief operating officer Stephanie Sutton; and board members Antony Blinken, the former secretary of state, and Jane Hartley, the former ambassador to Great Britain. The requests were filed in late 2025 and early 2026, before Trump threatened the potentially crippling defamation lawsuit against CAP.
Earlier, a blizzard of Heritage FOIA requests targeted the foundation of billionaire board member and longtime CAP benefactor Hansjörg Wyss – a major funder of progressive and environmental causes. Wyss-linked entities have channeled millions of dollars to CAP and its advocacy affiliate, CAP Action.
The existence and scope of the requests, which have not previously been reported, show how Heritage used a broad FOIA dragnet in an effort to map CAP’s connections to the Biden Administration.
The requests do not establish that Heritage’s information gathering was undertaken for Trump, or in anticipation of a lawsuit. But by the time Trump began threatening one of Washington’s most prominent progressive institutions, a substantial investigative file on CAP and the people around it was already being assembled.
Trump’s litigation threat came a month after CAP published an analysis challenging the president’s claims that deploying National Guard troops to American cities had driven down violent crime.
“In an effort to falsely claim his policies have reduced crime,” the Center’s Chandler Hall wrote on July 13, “the president is exploiting the fact that violent crime and murder were already declining in the cities his administration targeted with these extreme interventions.” Hall asserted that, in the 11 cities where the National Guard was deployed or threatened to be deployed, there was an average 14 percent decrease in their 12-month rolling violent crime rate and a 22 percent decrease in their 12-month rolling murder rate from June 2024 to June 2025.
But it wasn’t until Hall was featured a month later in a live interview on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal cable program that Trump took notice. The interview began airing at 9:25 a.m. on Monday, August 10. Trump apparently became aware of the appearance that day. By 10:30 p.m., he was posting a threat on Truth Social.
“Chandler Hall, representing, on Television, the foolish Center for American Lack of Progress, stated that adding the National Guard to Cities, including our now Great Again, Washington, D.C., had ‘NO impact on Crime.’ How crazy is that,” Trump began. “Hall was met with furious dissent. The report is just another Radical Left SCAM, as are the people who fund this gaggle of Lunatics. . . . This will be met with a lawsuit, which is being drawn now. I am also strongly considering adding some of the contributors to this Fake Organization. Crime is way down since I took Office, and they know it. Liars, at this level, must be held accountable! President DONALD J. TRUMP.”
Below his Truth Social post, Trump linked out to an earlier-that-day Fox News interview with his border czar, Tom Homan, who praised Trump for reducing crime in Washington. Homan said, “I’ve lived in D.C. at least 15 years, and I wouldn’t walk the streets of D.C. without a concealed weapon. But now, it’s a total change.”
A week later, Trump lawyer Alejandro Brito followed up with a demand that the Center retract statements in the report or face a $5 billion defamation lawsuit. His letter was addressed to the group’s president and chief executive, Tanden, and to several of its board members.
The Center refused to retract the story, or to apologize. “We will not be intimidated, and we will not back down,” Tanden said.
The Center, which reported $37.4 million in revenue and $48.3 million in expenses in 2024 (the most recent year available), is no stranger to litigation. Docket Alarm shows CAP has been involved in at least 66 cases, typically as amicus curiae rather than plaintiff or defendant.
As of this writing, Trump lawyer Brito hasn’t followed through on his threat. Brito has also represented Trump in lawsuits against ABC News (settled for $15 million); the New York Times and Penguin Random House ($15 billion claim, pending); the Wall Street Journal and Rupert Murdoch ($10 billion, pending); and the BBC ($10 billion, pending). Brito’s website says he’s a specialist in “high-stakes defamation litigation in federal courts nationwide.”
Even before Trump’s litigation threat, CAP appeared to see trouble coming. Early in 2025, after Trump returned to office, the organization stopped publishing its annual donor honor roll. CAP said the new administration was “actively targeting leaders and institutions that have challenged the president’s actions,” and that withholding donor names was a temporary step intended to protect contributors who might themselves become targets.
What CAP could not keep out of public view was a different kind of paper trail: the government’s own FOIA logs. A review of FOIA requests involving CAP, its senior officials, and members of its board shows that Heritage was systematically seeking government records concerning the organization’s leaders before Trump’s recent legal threat.
PoliScio Analytics’ competitive-intelligence database FOIAengine, which tracks FOIA requests in as close to real-time as their availability allows, shows that Heritage’s Mike Howell made FOIA requests variously on behalf of Heritage, its former in-house investigative arm the Oversight Project, and the Heritage-founded Daily Signal. Howell filed a concentrated burst of over 400 requests to over a dozen federal agencies and departments in December 2025 and early January 2026 that name-checked Tanden, among others, seeking her communications with various executive departments and agencies during her time at the Biden White House.
The FOIA requests were designed not simply to obtain a particular document, but to reconstruct networks within the Biden Administration. They sought emails, text messages, chats, calendar entries, and other communications.
Howell, the requester, has been candid about Heritage’s strategy.
“What we’re doing is realizing that white papers alone aren’t going to meet the moment of the agenda that we need to implement,” Howell said in 2022 while running Heritage’s Oversight Project. “We need to get some facts out there. So we’re suing. We’ve basically built a law firm” to file FOIA lawsuits.
Howell went on to say the objective was to “build a body of evidence.” Heritage describes its Oversight Project as an operation that uses FOIA requests, litigation, and investigative techniques to produce information that could be used for congressional oversight.
When Heritage spun off its Oversight Project as a separate 501(c)(4) in March 2025, it said the project had already filed more than 100,000 FOIA requests and nearly 100 lawsuits. Here’s a link to Heritage’s litigation as tracked by Docket Alarm.
Heritage’s FOIA campaign reached beyond Tanden.
Sutton, who became CAP’s chief operating officer in May 2025, was also named in a Heritage FOIA request. Her appointment provided another direct bridge between CAP and the recently departed Biden administration; Sutton had just served as acting assistant secretary of State for Global Public Affairs and previously as chief of staff for the State Department’s public-diplomacy operation. She remains CAP’s chief operating officer.
Heritage started building its FOIA operation in 2022. Its investigators began by mapping contacts among Democratic officials, progressive organizations and major donors while Biden was still president. Heritage’s Project 2025, meanwhile, was preparing policy and personnel for a future conservative administration. Click here to see our previous coverage,
There is no evidence in the FOIA logs reviewed by FOIAengine that Heritage or its Oversight Project was seeking the FOIA records at Trump’s direction, or for use in the threatened CAP defamation case. Nor did FOIAengine find requests concerning Chandler Hall, the CAP researcher whose National Guard analysis precipitated Trump’s threat.
What the records show instead is something that began much earlier. By the time Trump started threatening the Center for American Progress, a substantial effort to collect government records about the organization, its leaders, its financial supporters, and their Biden Administration relationships was already well underway.
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John A. Jenkins, co-creator of FOIAengine, is a Washington journalist and publisher whose work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, GQ, and elsewhere. He is a four-time recipient of the American Bar Association’s Gavel Award Certificate of Merit for his legal reporting and analysis. He is the author of The Partisan: The Life of William Rehnquist. His latest book is Summer of ’71: Five Months That Changed America, about the fateful year before Watergate. Click here to watch the official book trailer. Jenkins founded Law Street Media in 2013. Prior to that, he was President of CQ Press, the textbook and reference publishing enterprise of Congressional Quarterly. FOIAengine is a product of PoliScio Analytics (PoliScio.com), a new venture specializing in U.S. political and governmental research, co-founded by Jenkins and Washington lawyer Randy Miller. Learn more about FOIAengine here. To review FOIA requests mentioned in this article, subscribe to FOIAengine.
Write to John A. Jenkins at JAJ@PoliScio.com.