Kushnick Seeks Court Help on FOIA Request to FCC, Alleges Broader Telco/FCC Accounting Scandal
Bruce Kushnick asked a federal court to force the FCC to release records under the Freedom of Information Act about an Enforcement Bureau investigation of Verizon Wireless (Cellco Partnership) over allegations it improperly billed customers for unauthorized third-party products and…
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services ("cramming"). In a complaint Tuesday seeking injunctive relief from the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, Kushnick, executive director of New Networks Institute, said the FOIA request was "relevant to his work as a journalist." Kushnick said the bureau and Verizon Wireless entered into a consent decree May 12 in which the company agreed to make $90 million in payments to consumers, states and the U.S. Treasury to "ostensibly" resolve the cramming allegations (see 1505120047). He said he then submitted a FOIA request for all documents reviewed or generated by the FCC in the probe, including third-party documents and documents exchanged by Verizon and the agency. The FCC released 1,788 pages of documents in three batches that generally Verizon had agreed to with redactions, he said, but it withheld 14,327 pages it had identified as relevant, plus internal agency documents the commission said it didn't have to identify or produce. "There is no clear explanation of why information is redacted and why documents are not produced," said Kushnick, who said some redactions included publicly available information. He called an FCC summary explanation "plainly inadequate under FOIA standards as interpreted by the courts," and he said agency claims of exemptions couldn't withstand scrutiny. "Even when Verizon had no objection to the disclosure of documents, the FCC without explanation, did not disclose certain documents," he said. Kushnick recently wrote a Huffington Post piece headlined "Exposing One of the Largest Accounting Scandals in American History." He said AT&T, CenturyLink, Verizon and other major telcos had "manipulate[d] their financial accounting to make the local phone networks and services look unprofitable and have used this 'fact' in many public policy and regulatory decisions that benefited the incumbent telecommunications utilities." He said at the core of the scandal was the "FCC's Big Freeze." He detailed his charges against Verizon in recent filings to the agency in docket 10-132. The FCC and the telcos didn't comment Wednesday.