(Aug. 4, 2025): Southeastern Legal Foundation’s (SLF’s) Kimberly Hermann joins Just the News, No Noise to discuss the latest breaking news regarding corruption at some of the highest levels of government in the Obama and Biden Administrations.
SLF explains how the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) has withheld thousands of pages of documents from the American people regarding then-Vice President Joe Biden’s private emails on which he conducted government business. SLF has been fighting for these records via a FOIA request since 2023, and NARA has withheld approximately 99.7 percent of the documents. Hermann states that “for some reason, the holdovers at NARA…don’t want these emails out.” The content of the emails “wasn’t about grandchildren, it wasn’t about cookouts. This was key information, government business, being done over unsecured email servers.”
SLF recently learned that NARA was “subjectively reviewing” the documents and refusing to disclose why it was withholding certain records, so it plans to return to the court to ask the judge to intervene.
Prior to its work to expose Vice President Biden’s improper use of private emails, SLF also filed a FOIA request in 2019 seeking information related to the Steele Dossier, which was infamously used by the intelligence community to spy on the Trump campaign. SLF’s FOIA request to, and subsequent lawsuit against, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) triggered whistleblowers to come forward in opposition to the Steele Dossier.
At the time of the lawsuit, SLF requested any communications between intelligence agencies and key government officials regarding the Steele Dossier. After years of fighting for documents, the government responded that only two pages existed. But Hermann explains that in light of the recent declassification of ODNI documents regarding the Dossier, it has become apparent that not only did more documents exist, but it also “raises big flags” that ODNI may have acted in bad faith and intentionally withheld documents. Hermann states, “We can certainly hold the people who hid this from the American public accountable through lawsuits, through bar complaints, [and] ethical filings.”
SLF also discusses its other work to hold the government accountable. In addition to the lack of transparency in the federal government, federal agencies like the USDA are also engaging in unconstitutional racial discrimination. SLF has been representing farmers who were denied federal aid because their race and sex did not meet the agency’s “socially disadvantaged” standard, and it successfully stopped nine programs from discriminating against farmers across America. Under President Trump, and thanks to SLF’s efforts to bring awareness to more discrimination happening in other discriminatory programs, USDA has taken action to stop discriminating on the basis of race and sex moving forward.
Watch the full interview at JustTheNews.com.