The university cited exemptions permitting it to withhold 10 emails responsive to a request under the Freedom of Information Act.
In her response, university spokeswoman Amy Jesse said eight responsive emails would be withheld as “papers, records, documents, reports, materials, databases, or other evidence or information relative to criminal intelligence or any terrorism investigation in the possession of the Virginia Fusion Intelligence Center.”
According to its website, the Virginia Fusion Center “was created as a partnership between the Virginia State Police and Virginia Department of Emergency Management to improve the Commonwealth of Virginia’s preparedness against terrorist attacks and to deter criminal activity.”
Its primary mission is “to fuse together key counterterrorism and criminal intelligence resources from local, state, and federal agencies as well as private industries in a secure, centralized location, to facilitate information collection, prioritization, classification, analysis, and sharing, in order to better defend the Commonwealth against terrorist threats and/or attack and to deter criminal activity.”
Jesse said that two more emails would be withheld under the exemption provided by Virginia Code for “working papers and correspondence of the Office of the Governor, the Lieutenant Governor, or the Attorney General.”
Nine UMW students were among the 12 individuals who were arrested and charged with trespassing by university police in the early evening of April 27.
They are among more than 125 people who have been arrested at four Virginia universities in the past several weeks, according to the Virginia Mercury.
Students with the UMW chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine had set up an encampment in Jefferson Square on campus on Friday, April 26. The students took down the tents on Friday evening at the request of university officials, but re-staked them on Saturday morning, which was chilly and rainy.
UMW police began arresting participants around 5:30 p.m. on Saturday. Fredericksburg and Virginia State police were also present but did not carry out any of the arrests.
Following the arrests, UMW president Troy Paino said in a statement that “health and safety concerns began to emerge from the event as well as increased concerns for campus community members, as outside influence was further invited to campus to grow the encampment.”
FOIA Denials an Increasing Problem in Virginia
The Advance made the FOIA request on Sunday afternoon. That evening, Gov. Glenn Youngkin stated on CNN’s “State of the Nation” that he had “been working with our Attorney General Jason Miyares, our university presidents, [and] law enforcement at the state, local, and campus level to make sure that if there are protests, they are peaceful.”
The Youngkin administration has been subject to criticism and litigation in the past two years for withholding public records. Youngkin has frequently used the working papers exemption, as did the preceding Democratic governors Ralph Northam and Terry McAuliffe, according to a 2022 Virginia Mercury article.
The exemption is meant to shield correspondence “prepared by or for a public official identified … for his personal or deliberative use,” according to Virginia Code.
But Megan Rhyne, executive director of the Virginia Coalition for Open Government, said an entity cannot claim the exemption on behalf of another entity.
“It’s not up to [UMW] to assert the exemption on behalf of someone else,” Rhyne said in an email to the Advance. “The university can only use its own exemptions.”
UMW also did not make clear in its response which of the three offices—Governor, Lieutenant Governor, or Attorney General—the withheld emails were prepared for.
Virginia’s FOIA law contains a presumption that all public records and meetings should be open to inspection by the public. But according to a 2023 article by Virginia Public Media, the law in Virginia is weaker than in other states.
Virginia is among one-third of states that allow agencies to charge for the time it takes to fulfill a FOIA request. There’s no system in place—beyond litigation—that allows the public to appeal when agencies don’t comply with a records request, and exemptions for working papers and personnel records are broad and vague, open government advocates said in the VPM article.
