Josh Crank reports:
The Florida socialite whose FBI complaint led to the resignation of Gen. David Petraeus is suing the government for allegedly leaking her private emails to the press and tarnishing her reputation. But the Department of Justice is demanding that the suit be tossed on a technicality.
[…]
Kelley’s lawsuit is based in part on the Privacy Act, which establishes rules for federal agencies that handle the personal information of U.S. citizens. In its motion to dismiss, the Justice Department called the Privacy Act a “highly technical” statute from which many of the FBI’s records systems are exempt. The motion doesn’t specifically state that the FBI stored Kelley’s private emails in one of these exempted databases, but rather argues the lawsuit should be dismissed because Kelley can’t prove that it wasn’t.
“Disclosure claims under the Privacy Act are governed by a rule of retrieval – to be actionable, disclosed information about an individual must have been retrieved from a protected system of records,” according to the dismissal motion. “But plaintiffs fail to make allegations to satisfy the retrieval rule, and that omission prevents plaintiffs from stating a claim for a wrongful disclosure.”
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Isn’t this what discovery is for??