Twitter-Assist Award
President Donald Trump
It's not often that prying documents out of the CIA comes with a little bit of help from the commander in chief. But BuzzFeed reporter Jason Leopold (yeah, he turns up a lot in The Foilies) stumbled into just that kind of luck when Trump tweeted an acknowledgement that he had ended "massive, dangerous, and wasteful payments to Syrian rebels fighting Assad."
Leopold requested information on the payments from the CIA. Despite the president's confirmation that these payments existed, the CIA still refused to confirm or deny the records existed, a move known in the legal world as a "Glomar response." Leopold went to court and a judge found that because Trump had acknowledged the payments publicly, the CIA had to stop playing secrecy games and hand over the documents.
