The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) is the most wonderful law. I have gushed about it many times. Americans have the right to see and copy documents from the government archives. Officials have to respond to these requests, and can even be sued for failing to respond in time.
Of course, the U.S. government is still a government, and FOIA gives officials a lot of leeway in censoring documents before releasing them to the public. The infamous black highlighter — nowadays, it’s usually a white box — gets applied liberally to documents before they’re declassified. Sometimes the redactions are quite ridiculous.
On Friday, the U.S. Treasury sent me a memo that was entirely blacked out:
Most of the memo was censored under FOIA exemption b(5), which protects “inter-agency or intra-agency memorandums or letters that would not be available by law to a party.” In theory, the rule was designed to protect the “deliberative process,” so that officials can debate issues in private, and to prevent incomplete drafts of policies from becoming public record. In practice, b(5) is the “Withhold It Because You Want To” rule.
Ok, so the Treasury’s FOIA officer redacted the whole document using a vague rule. That is disappointing but not unusual. What is weird is that the officer also cited exemption b(6), the rule protecting personal privacy, to censor the name of the Director of the Office of Sanctions Policy and Implementation at the State Department.
That name, Taylor Ruggles, is definitely not private information. Why would it be? He was a public official. His title, email, and office phone number are listed on the Federal Register. Ruggles also lists the title on his LinkedIn. As a career U.S. diplomat, he’s had plenty of very public-facing jobs before and after the sanctions directorate.

So why was his name redacted? There clearly wasn’t a policy of redacting all names, because Andrea Gacki is still named Director of the Office of Foreign Asset Control, and the document still lists Delta Crescent Energy on the subject line. Perhaps because Gacki was a Treasury official and Ruggles was a State Department official, the Treasury’s FOIA officer felt more comfortable releasing the former name.
The context of the document itself is interesting. At the time, the Trump administration was trying to cut a deal for Syrian Kurdish-led forces to export oil through Delta Crescent, an American company formed for this purpose. Because Syria is under U.S. economic sanctions, and ownership of the oil is a complicated issue, the U.S. government would have to grant some special legal carveouts for the deal to happen.
At a December 2020 congressional hearing, Trump administration official Joel Rayburn said that the State Department had issued “foreign policy guidance” to the Treasury regarding Delta Crescent’s activities. I sent a FOIA request for that “guidance” right after the hearing, and this heavily-redacted memo is the response I got, three years later.
The Treasury also gave me the State Department’s guidance for GDC Incorporated, the company run as part of Moti Kahana’s failed madcap scheme to get Syria’s oil. That memo, and Ruggles’ name on it, was similarly covered in black highlighter:
I’m considering filing an appeal. If you have experience dealing with this issue, feel free to reach out. I believe the public has an interest in seeing what the Treasury’s FOIA officer did not want it to see.