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74 Pages | Tue, 23 Jun 2020 | Source : Property of the People

These documents, obtained in one of our FOIA lawsuits against the U.S. Attorney’s Office for DC (USADC), pertain to Washington, DC’s Lewis List and Lewis Committee. Maintained by USADC, the Lewis List (DC’s Brady list) is a list of DC police officers and federal agents found (by the police department and the DOJ, via USADC’s Lewis Committee) to have engaged in behaviors so egregious that information about these officers’ misdeeds is constitutionally required to be disclosed to defendants if these officers are to testify in court. The DOJ continues to fight with nearly everything at its disposal to avoid complying with our FOIA request and our FOIA lawsuit for more documents about the Lewis List and Lewis Committee. Property of the People believes that of course the public needs access to the identities of cops so bad that even the DOJ knows they can’t be allowed to testify in court. Perhaps even more important, however, is access to information about how the Lewis List operates. Crucially, we need to know what information gets put on the list, and what information from the list actually makes its way to defendants. One of the documents in this release sheds light on exactly this question. The document that constitutes the final three pages of this release appears to be guidance from USADC to trial prosecutors about when to disclose information from the list to defendants. Disturbingly, much of the time, the guidance appears to be, “Don’t.”