The CIA may decline to respond to a Freedom of Information Act request by BuzzFeed Inc. for information about payments to Syrian rebels because a tweet by then-President Donald Trump wasn’t an official acknowledgment of the existence of agency records, the D.C. Circuit ruled Tuesday.
After the Washington Post reported about a covert program to arm the rebels, Trump tweeted on July 24, 2017, that the reporter “fabricated the facts on my ending massive, dangerous, and wasteful payments to Syrian rebels fighting Assad.”
A federal trial court in November 2019 ruled that because the tweet acknowledged some payments, the Central...