| FOIA Files is back! I hope everyone had a relaxing spring break and a joyful Passover and Easter. I spun records by Joe McPhee, Albert Ayler and Paul Bley and totally zoned out on free jazz. Speaking of records, I recently obtained a stack of another variety. These came from the State Department’s Office of Inspector General, and include final reports of investigation related to waste, fraud and abuse. Buried deep in the more than 500 pages of documents, which I requested in 2022, two reports stood out. One is about a leak investigation involving then-Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell (now President Donald Trump’s Special Envoy for Special Missions of the United States and interim director of the Kennedy Center). The other is about former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s speechwriter, who apparently had a voracious appetite for Wi-Fi while traveling on Air Force Two. If you’re not already getting FOIA Files in your inbox, sign up here. Grenell is a prolific poster on X. In 2016, when the social media platform was known as Twitter, he described Trump as “dangerous” and “reckless.” After Trump won the presidential election, Grenell deleted his tweets and became one of the president’s most trusted confidantes and defenders. That loyalty was rewarded when Grenell was nominated ambassador to Germany in September 2017. He arrived at his new post in Berlin shortly after Trump announced that the US was withdrawing from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. The pact, negotiated under President Barack Obama, called for the US and other countries to lift sanctions against Iran in exchange for curtailed nuclear production. Germany was one of the countries that wanted to stick with the Obama deal, which turned out to be a boon for German companies. Grenell angered German politicians and business leaders after he publicly called them out for their stance. “As @realDonaldTrump said, US sanctions will target critical sectors of Iran’s economy. German companies doing business in Iran should wind down operations immediately,” Grenell posted on Twitter. (The tweet has since been deleted and German companies stopped doing business with Iran later in 2018 when the Trump administration reimposed sanctions on Iran). “Sensitive But Unclassified” | Two years into Grenell’s tenure as ambassador to Germany, he came under scrutiny, again related to Iran, according to the State Department’s inspector general report that I obtained. The details of the investigation have not been previously disclosed. The probe, conducted jointly with the Bureau of Diplomatic Security's Office of Special Investigations, was opened on March 10, 2020. Grenell had pasted a “sensitive but unclassified” State Department cable—commonly referred to by government officials as SBU—into an email that he sent to a person who worked at a Washington think tank and was also a “media contributor.” Above the classification line, Grenell wrote, “Thoughts?” A copy of the cable Grenell sent wasn’t disclosed. But the IG report said it was dated Jan. 7, 2020 and officially sent to all diplomatic and consular posts. A bit of sleuthing reveals that it’s likely the cable Pompeo sent that day ordering diplomats to cease meeting with Iranian opposition groups. This unauthorized disclosure doesn’t appear to have risen to the level of Signalgate. The State Department’s definition for a document marked SBU is “information that is not classified for national security reasons,” but must be withheld from public disclosure for other reasons, such as internal deliberations or trade secrets. Still, it is the type of leak that the Trump administration has recently cracked down on and threatened to punish federal workers for. The details of the investigation revealing how Grenell landed in hot water are very interesting. The cable is identified in the documents as “20 State 1210.” Just minutes after it was sent, the State Department’s Office of Iranian Affairs began receiving a flurry of inquiries about the cable from congressional staffers and the media. An official at the State Department grew suspicious because the cable had only just been disseminated and its recipients were limited to the State Department diplomats. Suspecting a leak, the official filed an “unauthorized disclosure report” with the diplomatic security office. The official’s name was redacted in one paragraph of the IG report, but his surname was left intact in another sentence. FOIA Files has learned that the official was Gabriel Noronha. At the time, Noronha was the special advisor for the State Department’s Iran Action Group. (He was fired on Jan. 7, 2021 after he posted a tweet that said Trump was responsible for the Capitol riots and was “unfit” for office.) Noronha told investigators that he suspected Grenell might have been the one responsible for the leak because he was “disgruntled about the policy.” The special investigations office and inspector general then launched a formal probe. Investigators reviewed Grenell’s emails and quickly turned up the one with the cable he sent to the person at the think tank that was marked SBU. The IG’s report noted that Grenell’s security training records showed he completed a course “on the proper handling of SBU information.” In an interview with the investigators two months later, Grenell, whose diplomatic credentials date back to George W. Bush’s presidency, admitted “he did not have authority to share SBU information with anyone” outside of the State Department. When shown a copy of his email, Grenell explained to investigators that the person he sent it to at the think tank was an old colleague and they maintained a friendship. The report said Grenell acknowledged he “must have sent the email with the cable” but “had no memory of doing so.” Grenell “speculated,” the report said, “that he may have wanted to get thoughts from an expert regarding the restrictions laid out in the cable.” Grenell did not respond to a request for comment. I reached Noronha for comment while he was at a conference in India. He confirmed that he wrote the report. In a subsequent statement, he said that he “submitted a routine leak report at the request of Department leadership.” Then, he asserted, the State Department went “on a fishing expedition where they fixated on Grenell among the various cable recipients and asked me to speculate why he might have forwarded an unclassified cable.” The State Department didn’t respond to a request for comment. Now, Noronha chalks up the entire incident to “a waste of everyone’s time” and has nothing but praise for his former colleague. “Ric Grenell is a badass and patriot who has done more to fight for the human rights of the Iranian people than just about anyone in Washington,” Noronha said. Have you ever used up “most of the bandwidth” on an airplane, preventing other travelers from completing their work? Me neither. One of Pompeo’s former speechwriters was accused of doing just that when he was traveling with the Secretary of State on Air Force Two in 2019, according to another IG report. It was considered such a big deal that the State Department’s Insider Threat Assessment Committee and Computer Threat and Analysis Division also looked into it. They found that the speechwriter—a political appointee—was sucking up the plane’s bandwidth while writing op-eds that were unrelated to his work, “political in nature” and may have violated the Hatch Act. It didn’t end there. The computer threat division then monitored the speechwriter’s use of agency resources in real time over a six month period between 2019 and 2020. They concluded that the speechwriter continued to use business hours to write op-eds and work on paid personal projects. The speechwriter explained to investigators that “although he completed this work while using Department resources and during the Department's regular working hours, he completed the tasks during his ‘free time,’” the report said. The speechwriter’s boss told investigators he wasn’t surprised that the employee worked on personal projects during work hours. Their office, he said, didn’t rely on timesheets and other “bureaucratic controls.” As long as the speechwriter was able to finish his assigned work, he was expected to manage his own time. The speechwriter’s boss acknowledged to investigators, however, that “it was not okay” to “work on outside employment using Department resources nor to complete this work while on duty.” In the end, the special investigations office sent another office a “Memorandum of Debt Collection” totaling $3,842.16. That was the amount of earnings the speechwriter “collected while working on outside employment during normal Department business hours,” according to the report. Did the speechwriter ever pay his debt? The report doesn’t say. Got a tip for a document you think I should request via FOIA? Do you have details to share about the state of FOIA under the Trump administration? Send me an email: jleopold15@bloomberg.net or jasonleopold@protonmail.com. Or send me a secure message on Signal: @JasonLeopold.666. | 
