Nassar Afshar v. Department of State

How courts have described this case

Verbatim parenthetical descriptions written by other courts when citing this decision. Ranked by citation-network relevance.

• holding that “a plaintiff asserting a claim of prior disclosure must bear the initial burden of pointing to specific information in the public domain that appears to duplicate that being withheld”
• holding that “a number of books by former CIA agents and officials, all of which were 16 submitted to the agency for prepublication review” still fell short of “an official and documented disclosure, as the release of CIA cables would be”
• noting that books by former CIA agents, even where the books had been prescreened and approved by the CIA, did not constitute official and documented disclosures for purposes of waiving an exemption
• noting that “official acknowledgment by an authoritative source” of a fact that “is the subject of widespread media and public speculation” may “be new information that could cause damage to the national security”
• noting that “official acknowledgment by an authoritative source” of a fact that “is the subject of widespread media and public speculation” may “be new information that could cause damage to the national security”
• rejecting suggestion that public speculation about CIA liaison with Iranian government constituted prior disclosure

Source: CourtListener parenthetical corpus (CC0).