FOIAengine: Was the FTC Involved in Operation “Arctic Frost”?
The conservative Heritage Foundation continues to flood federal agencies with Freedom of Information Act requests seeking detailed records about the machinations of the departed Biden administration.
During November, Heritage affiliates The Daily Signal and the Oversight Project filed 131 requests with the Federal Trade Commission, almost all focused on developments between January 20, 2021, and January 20, 2025. These requests constituted 31 percent of the 422 requests received by the FTC during November.
The requests are submitted in the name of The Daily Signal, a 19-person news publication launched by Heritage in 2014. The publication states that it is an independent organization. But the official requester for all 131 requests was Mike Howell, the President of Heritage’s Oversight Project.
The Oversight Project has described itself as “a new initiative aimed at increasing aggressive oversight of the … administration and the political and corporate enablers of the leftist regime.” Howell has stated that the project has “unearthed massive amounts of fraud, corruption, and abuse within our federal government.”
During the last presidential election cycle, Howell and his Heritage colleagues introduced the new strategy of filing tens of thousands of FOIA requests to unearth information about Biden Administration personnel and actions. Less than two months into President Donald Trump’s second term, Heritage announced it had already filed over 100,000 FOIA requests.
Even before the 2024 election, agencies said the crush of Heritage FOIA requests was straining resources. In an October 1, 2024, article in ProPublica, Noah Bookbinder, president and CEO of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, characterized the wave of requests as “an effort to either intimidate government employees or, ultimately, to fire them and replace them with people who are going to be loyal to a leader that they may prefer.”
Howell responded that “Our work is meant to just figure out who the decision-makers are.”
In the same ProPublica article, an unidentified government employee who processes FOIAs reported that Heritage requests “sometimes … come in at a rate of one a second” and that FOIA employees spend as much as a third of their workday processing Heritage requests.
There was speculation that Heritage’s FOIA efforts might taper off once its allies controlled the Executive Branch. But November’s FTC logs – the latest available in our FOIAengine database – demonstrate that federal agencies are continuing to receive significant numbers of highly detailed Heritage requests.
At PoliScio Analytics, we have followed these developments closely. Our October 10, 2024, article analyzed the role of FOIA in Heritage’s opposition research. In January, we published a database listing the 1,400 Executive Branch officials in 20 federal agencies targeted by Heritage requests. A second database listed the 400 targeted Department of Defense officials. With the requests continuing to play a role in Trump administration initiatives, on April 30 we published an article about the role of Heritage requests in President Trump’s efforts to control major U.S. law firms.
Many of Heritage’s November requests to the FTC explicitly targeted the period from January 20, 2021, through January 20, 2025 – the length of the Biden administration. Others focus on a narrow window within that span, most notably November 4-8, the week of the 2024 presidential election.
The requests also focus overwhelmingly on communications – emails and, in some instances, records of calls – associated with specific FTC officials.
Many requests instruct the agency to search a commissioner’s records for communications that “contain” terms, which often relate to partisan hot-button issues. Others ask for all communications for a specific official during a defined period.
The largest block of November requests – 40 in total – targets communications associated with Chair Lina Khan. Thirty-nine of these are nearly identical, broad requests for all types of records, each one for a different month during the Biden Administration. This information could be used to correlate those communications with known events such as major enforcement actions, rulemaking announcements, or political developments.
A second large cluster – 44 requests – centers on the week of the 2024 election. These requests named a wide range of senior FTC officials, including Khan and her fellow commissioners, as well as the agency’s chief of staff, chief technology officer, and chief financial officer. They instruct the agency to search their communications during November 4–8, 2024, for the keywords “Trump,” “election,” and “day off.” These records could be used to identify the political views of the targeted individuals.
Several smaller bundles of communications reference external government entities. Four requests instruct the FTC to search for communications containing specific National Security Council distribution-list addresses over the 2021–2025 period. Another four requests target communications involving the White House Situation Room, identifying phone numbers associated with that office and asking whether the named FTC officials communicated with those lines during the same timeframe.
Separately, a set of five requests asks for communications involving FTC officials and email addresses associated with six state government domains: Minnesota, Arizona, Colorado, Illinois, Michigan and New Mexico. These all happen to be states President Biden won in 2020 and were viewed as critical to a Democratic victory in 2024.
Another distinct group of requests searched for a specific phrase, “Arctic Frost,” across the communications of multiple FTC officials, again during the 2021–2025 period. Arctic Frost is the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s code name for the Bureau’s investigation, opened in April 2022, into efforts by Trump and others to overturn the 2020 presidential election results through various means, including the alleged “false electors” scheme and related efforts to obstruct Congress’s certification.
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Next: The latest hedge fund FOIA requests to the Food and Drug Administration.
Randy E. Miller, co-creator of FOIAengine, is a Washington lawyer, publisher, and former government official. He has developed several online information products and was a partner at Hogan Lovells, where he founded the firm’s Brussels office and represented clients on international regulatory matters. Miller also has served as a White House trade lawyer, Senior Legal Adviser to the U.S. Mission to the World Trade Organization, policy director to Senator Bob Dole, and adjunct professor at Georgetown University. He is a graduate of Yale and Georgetown Law. FOIAengine is a product of PoliScio Analytics (PoliScio.com), a venture specializing in U.S. political and governmental research, co-founded by Miller and Washington journalist John A. Jenkins. Write to Randy E. Miller at randy@poliscio.com.