Asking the FBI to Release the Santa Files

Hello, I'm Michelle Hussain, and for more than 20 years, I was at the BBC. Military withdrawal from Afghanistan. But all the time I was delivering the headlines, I wanted to go further than the news of the day, to spend more time with the people shaping our world. And that's what I'm doing here on this podcast. Speaking to people from Nigel Farage... Russia needs to be taught a lesson. ...to tech journalist Cara Swisher. And the tech industry is running wild. You know, they've gotten what they wanted and they've seen a huge run up in their stock prices. This will be a place where every weekend you can count on one essential conversation to help make sense of the world. So please join me, listen and subscribe to The Michelle Hussain Show from Bloomberg Weekend, wherever you get your podcasts. You certainly ask interesting questions. What the f*** are you wearing? okay this is this is a little scary isn't it obvious what are you an elf i'm an elf yes you are wearing an elf outfit why are you wearing an elf costume because jason i have a very special holiday foia story for you today and i think you're gonna like it are you ready oh my god i'm ready can i do the thing this time do it brother jingle them bells i'm investigative journalist Jason Leopold. I spend most of my days getting documents from the government. I'm attorney Matt Toppin, and I fight them in court to open their files when they don't want to. From Bloomberg and No Smiling, this is Disclosure, a podcast about buying loose government secrets, the Freedom of Information Act, and the unexpected places that takes us. So I have a special story for you, Jason. and I'm going to take you back to 2023. Set it up. All right, so picture this. Chicago, Matt's office, December 8th, 2023. Our law firm, we have a pretty big holiday party every year. Bunch of other lawyers come, clients come, and it's like an hour or so before our big annual holiday party is going to start. You know, I'm sitting around. I'm having a pregame whiskey. I'm listening to some Nat King coal. A little bit of Santa Claus is coming to town. Just getting in the mood for holiday time. And I think to myself, I should make some kind of a holiday FOIA request. So this is what I sell on. I decided to make a FOIA request to our very good friends at the Federal Bureau of Investigation. And here is my request. Greetings. I request the first 25 pages you locate from a CRS main file in cross-reference search for the term, quote, Santa Claus, end quote. Oh my God. Amazing. You like that? Amazing. So what's the CRS, Jason? Well, the CRS is a central record system, the database that holds 100 million FBI files, investigative files. So investigative, right? It's not like communications with Congress or, you know, kind of internal policy things for the most part. Like this is this is investigative records. This is the bread and butter, you know, FBI is investigating and they need a system and they keep it all in the CRS. Right. So tell us about main file and cross reference searches. What does that mean? A main file is the file on the subject, right? The subject would be Santa Claus. And a cross-reference search would be where there are references to that subject in other investigative files that the FBI maintains. It's sort of like if the FBI were investigating Satan and, you know, Satan and Santa had some interactions and Santa ends up in Satan's file. Is that right? Are you breaking news here about a previously unknown relationship between Santa Claus and Satan? I mean, their names are anagrams. All right. So back to the story. What I'm doing here is I'm saying go to your fancy record keeping system and search that I want to see if you have any main files that hit on the search term Santa Claus and any cross reference files that hit on the term Santa Claus. And I'm thinking, you know, probably there's not going to be a main file unless maybe Santa Claus is some alias for somebody. but there could be cross references. And what I'm thinking as one example might be, if there were bank robberies and people were dressed up as Santa Claus, they might want to at some point be like, Hey, I need a list. I need a list of every bank robbery in which someone was dressed up as Santa Claus in the, that's what the cross reference searches in the cross referencing system would allow you to do. So I make my request and I finished my whiskey and I enjoy my colleagues and clients and friends at our holiday party. And I wait. I wait a little bit. And I don't have to wait that long because on December 13th, 2023, five days after I make my request, I get a response from the FBI. And that's pretty fast, right? That is really fast. Would you care to venture a guess as to what the response was? Yeah. So this is 2023. I was going to say, if you filed this request in, say, 2015 or 16, I would have said that the FBI's response to you would have been they were unable to locate any responsive records. But since you filed it in 2023, I'm going to say that the FBI Glomar'd you. Glomar. So that would be, hey, wait a second now. We can't tell you if we're investigating Santa or not because we can't tip Santa off that we're on to him. Exactly. Right. That would be that would be the Glomar or or it would be, hey, now Santa Claus has got privacy rights and we're not going to invade those privacy rights by telling you whether we investigated Santa Claus or not. That's my guess. That's a good guess. That is not actually what their response is. Oh, what? Here's the response, Jason. December 13th, 2023. Request number 1612945-000 subject Santa Claus. Dear Mr. Topic, this is in response to your Freedom of Information Privacy Act's FOIPA request to the FBI. Below you find information relevant to your request. Please read each item carefully. Your request did not contain enough identifying information for this office to make a determination regarding the responsiveness of records in our central record system. We're not even getting to the really good part. Oh my God. Therefore, your request is being administratively closed. please provide any additional information that would help locate the records with a reasonable amount of effort. This might include the subject's complete name, date of birth, prior addresses, former employment information, or any incidents for which you believe the FBI may have investigated the subject. This office will conduct a new search upon receipt of the additional information. That's news right there, by the way. The fact that the FBI, I would have turned that immediately into a story. The FBI does not know who Santa Claus is. That would be the headline. They do not know who Santa Claus is. Yeah, exactly. And I kind of wondered if maybe this was like, oh, wait a second. The existence of Santa Claus or not is a subject that the FBI should not be taking a position on. It also seems to be like, is the FBI messing with you? Are they like, oh, okay, this is a good request. Now we want you to tell us what Santa Claus's real name is. They want you to say he lives at the North Pole. They want you to say his name's Kris Kringle. So I do wonder. Born on December 25th, right? Is that right? I'm assuming. I don't know. That's allegedly the birth date of Jesus. Oh, right, right. my bad i did wonder if they were like taking the bait a little bit or the opposite would be like no human even really like read it it was all like automated and no one actually thought for a second are we seriously going to say this about santa claus so what do you think jason am i gonna be like oh oh too bad nothing there is that what i do uh no i assume you immediately appealed well Well, so they didn't deny it. They administratively closed it, which, and they did not include language requiring me to appeal. So I did not appeal. Instead, I sent an email to the good folks at FOIPAquestions at FBI.gov and to OGIS. And to OGIS. The Office of Government Information Services that is sort of like the mediator. They mediate requests or try to get you some relief if an agency is not being responsive or turning over records and maybe you don't want to go to litigation, but you want them to kind of step in. Exactly. They can kind of help to broker a resolution and help clear up confusion. And I think especially with requesters who are new to it, it can be really helpful to help them understand how stuff works. So I send a two and a half page email addressing the things that the FBI tells me they need to know in order to process my request. All right. Are you ready, Jason? I'm ready. Here we go. All right. Dear FBI and OGIS, I submitted the above referenced FOIA request. The request sought the first 25 pages resulting from CRS main file and cross searches for the term quote Santa Claus FBI denied my request stating that it quote did not contain enough identifying information for this office to make a determination regarding the responsiveness of records in our central records system, end quote, and administratively closed the request. FBI also suggested that I provide the, quote, subject's complete name, date of birth, prior addresses, former employment information, or any incidents for which you believe the FBI may have investigated the subject, end quote. I write asking that FBI reconsider. By the way, that is too nice. Well, you know, Jason, this is the holidays, my friend. So I was... I think the elf suit is making you soft. Were you wearing the elf suit while you filed this? I was not wearing the elf suit. Okay. Okay. Fair. Okay. I was not wearing the elf suit. This is Special Agent Regal, Special Agent Bradley Hall. The time is approximately 11.15 a.m. About to start consensual telephone call with Dr. Daiwa Zhang. China's Ministry of State Security is one of the most mysterious and powerful spy agencies in the world. But in 2017, the FBI got inside. I've never seen that much evidence in my entire career, and I don't think we'll ever see that much evidence again. I now have several terabytes of an MSS officer, no doubt, no question, of his life. And that's a unicorn. This is a story of the inner workings of the MSS and how one man's ambition and mistakes opened its vault of secrets. Listen to The Sixth Bureau from Bloomberg Podcasts starting on February 13th on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. so first though i gotta kind of clear some things up because you might have picked up on this but in addition to it being like do you really need me to tell you who santa claus is they're really not properly interpreting my request and it is exactly what they do to people all the time so while this is meant to be funny. This also illustrates the absurdity of how the FBI sometimes handles things. They don't really read the request and understand it. They just have this robotic way that they go about it. I must search the CRS and I must see if this is here, right? They're not really thinking about it. So first I'm going to explain to them here why they're not interpreting my request. Records are responsive to my request if they result from the search that I specified. There is no separate responsiveness review. It does not matter what the record is or what or who it is about. And it is not necessary that Santa Claus be the subject of an FBI investigation for a record to be responsive to my request. If a record results from the search I specified, it is responsive. this should be the easiest way to make a request. Just give them the search terms. They run the search and you get the results instead of like, I want records about this person, right? It's, this should have been very clean and simple. So I should not have even needed to explain to them who Santa Claus is. Yeah. So I go on, well, the additional information FBI requested is not necessary because it is misunderstood the scope of the request to be records in which the FBI investigated Santa Claus. I'm happy to provide some additional information. Now, are you ready to go, buddy? Oh, man. I actually learned some things about Santa Claus that I hadn't really previously known. Santa Claus is completely a Miss Santa Claus, but he's also been known as Father Christmas, St. Nicholas, St. Nick, Kris Kringle, or Santa. Love it. To provide some additional context about who Santa Claus is, according to legend, every Christmas Eve, I can't do this without laughing. Every Christmas Eve, Santa delivers presents to children around the world, but only if they have been good. Santa Claus is said to have origins in St. Nicholas of Myra, who was born March 15th. I can't do it. Who was born March 15th, 270 AD. And Father Christmas, who originated in 16th century England. But Santa Claus, as we understand him in America, is generally considered to have originated with the publication of the book in New Year's Present to the Little Ones from 5 to 12 in 1821, and the poem A Visit from St. Nicholas, now known as The Night Before Christmas in 1823. I love it. All right, so they've asked me like, hey, who's this Santa Claus guy you're talking about? When was he born? There you go. I mean, born? We don't really know. He's magical. But like, these are the origins of where Santa Claus began. Father Christmas, give us some money. Oh, it's good. The kinks. And you know what? Now that you mention that, you could see that perhaps the FBI found that song to be subversive and began an investigation into the kinks and cross-referenced Santa Claus. Not so crazy, right? This could happen. All right, continuing. To the best of my knowledge, Santa Claus has always resided at the North Pole. Although it has been said that he spends time in tropical locations immediately after Christmas. i just love i love to the best of my knowledge like like hey you know i'm saying this under penalty of perjury right to the best of my knowledge that's where he was on we don't really know there's a lot of mystery around santa claus i'm attempting to clear it up to these people at the fbi who apparently have never heard of santa claus i'm trying to give them enough to understand who santa claus is even though again they didn't really all they to do is like type it into the search box and give me the results yeah continuing on the subject of santa's employment santa's employment has always been judging the perceived goodness or badness of children manufacturing toys and other presents and delivering the appropriate presents or coal for those judged to be bad and more generally to the spreading of good cheer at christmas Santa also frequently appears in advertisements and in popular films and TV shows. A more cynical person, one we may commonly refer to as a, quote, Scrooge or, quote, Grinch, may say that Santa's job has been to promote materialism. That Santa is a tool to make poor children feel bad about themselves as a result of the lesser volume of Christmas presents, or even no presents, they often receive. Wow, you took this to another level. Oh, dude, like, if I'm in it, I'm in it. You want me to tell you who Santa Claus is? I'm going to tell you who Santa Claus is. Oh, man. This is a paper on Santa Claus. I love it. We're not even halfway through the letter yet, just so you have a frame of reference. All right. So I'm talking about Santa's jobs. And a cynical person may say that he's a tool to make poor children feel bad about themselves as a result of the lesser volume of Christmas presents or even no presents they offer. C.E.G. Ruby Sue's character in the film Christmas Vacation. Or that Santa Claus normalizes Christianity in America and others people who do not celebrate Christmas. And that Santa Claus teaches children to accept the modern surveillance state. Oh my God. That's good. Still other people believe that Santa Claus is taken away from the quote true meaning of Christmas, which they contend to be a celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ. Parentheses. For your reverence, Jesus Christ is a central figure in Christianity, believed by Christians to be the son of God who was born 0 AD in Bethlehem to save the world. I will be making a request on Jesus Christ on December 25th. Please start processing that. I mean, if they did know who Santa was, it was fair for me to wonder if maybe they never heard of Jesus. And so I'm going to go ahead and just affirmatively address that now. Okay. Depending on one's perspective, any of these might be considered Santa Claus's quote employment. FBI's letter also asked that I identify incidents for which I believe Santa Claus may have been investigated by the FBI. To my knowledge, despite what may be unauthorized violations of U.S. airspace, violations of eavesdropping and privacy laws involving minor children, and the opportunity to use his annual delivery run to disperse... Give me a second. Oh my God. and the opportunity to use his annual delivery run to distribute narcotics manufactured by his elves, the FBI has never investigated Santa Claus. Did you say that? That's in your letter? That's what I said. Yes, I'm reading you the letter. That is amazing. If I'm the FBI, I could think, hey, Santa Claus could be a great cover for like narcotics distribution. All right, we're coming to the end here. I hope this additional information is useful, but to reiterate again, my request simply seeks whatever records result from typing Santa Claus into whatever search tool in the CRS the FBI uses to conduct main file and cross-reference searches. While there has been much debate about whether Santa Claus is real, please note that because of the manner in which my request was phrased, responding to the request does not require the FBI to reach any conclusion or take any position on this controversial subject. I ask that you reconsider your decision to administratively close this request and run the searches I requested. Happy holidays, Matt Topic. Wow, you didn't say Merry Christmas. You said happy holidays. Well, I don't know what holidays they celebrate or not. Fair. I'm a happy holidays person. You know, I know I'm a happy holidays person, too. We'll let the hate mail go ahead and start flowing on in here. But like, I think some people celebrate Christmas. Some people celebrate other holidays. Some people don't celebrate anything. So I think I prefer happy holidays. this is well first of all the letter i mean needs to be framed you got to frame the fbi's response to your request and then your letter next to it because it is not presented in any sarcastic way i mean it is serious Like okay you need more info You got it You asked I answered All right. Did they respond? So see, what I'm doing here is instead of getting to them. Right. I'm just like, I'm going to kill them with kindness. Yeah. This is so to speak. Did they respond? Okay. December 22nd, 2023. Oh, we're getting up to the liar. It's a Christmas miracle. It is a Christmas miracle because they agree to reconsider. Oh, my God. I get a letter from them that says, we're reopening your request in light of the additional information that you have provided. But there's only three days till Christmas. I know. And I didn't get anything. I just got their commitment that they were going to reopen it and they would see. So apparently now that they've been properly educated on who Santa Claus is. Oh, you meant Santa Claus. Like, really Santa Claus? Oh, okay. Wait, this is like, let's just stop for a second here. This is a big deal, right? Just getting the FBI to reconsider and saying, okay, we're going to reopen your request. We'll process it is a big deal because they don't often do that unless a requester actually provides them with that kind of info that you sent them. Right. And the reality is most requesters will just kind of throw their hands up at it, right? It's like too much work, not going to do it. Yep. But this is why it's important when you're filing a request to just really follow it through to the end. Oh, yeah. Even if the response is as ridiculous as, please provide us with Santa's date of birth and previous places of employment. and why we might have been investigating him. Right. So December 22nd, just a few days before Christmas, they tell me they're going to reconsider. So late January 2024, I get a CD in the mail. No. And usually I just get, we get your CDs and then we load them up and give them to you. But like this one's to me, right? Like it's addressed to me, Matthew Vincent Topic, FOIA request number, subject Santa Claus. and I get a letter and I get a CD. All right, now I'm going to read you from the letter. Okay. Dear Matthew Topic, the FBI has completed its search for records subject to the Freedom of Information Act that are responsive to your request. The enclosed 25 pages of records were determined to be responsive to your subject and were previously processed and released. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Uh-huh. Previously processed? Uh-huh. All right, I'm like, I definitely feel my blood pressure starting to increase on this one. Now they're taunting me. Yeah, this is, they're f***ing with you. First of all, they had previously processed records for Santa Claus, and they respond to you with, we need more info, when they actually previously processed records, and they didn't even conduct a new search. Right. It's not what I asked for. And I don't think there was a prior Santa Claus request. I think they just went to the database of records they previously released. They searched for Santa Claus. Right. And they gave me the hit. Yeah. So they did the right search in the wrong place. I didn't want pre-processed stuff. I wanted to see what did they tag in the CRS on the search term Santa Claus. This is exactly what the FBI did to Attorney General Pam Bondi when she requested the SD file. That's exactly what happened. This is exactly what the FBI did. They gave her pre-processed records. I wonder I should tell her about this. She might be like, yeah, she might be sympathetic. But that's what the FBI does. There should really be an inspector general investigation into how they handled this request, in my opinion. Yeah. So the letter goes on, in an effort to provide you with responsive records as expeditiously as possible, we are releasing documents from previous requests regarding your subject. we consider your requests fulfilled and then they're saying if i want something else then i have to make a new request which is just the classic they're just they're going through the whole playbook oh man of like of how to be difficult and then it's like you fight them on the first one and then now it's the now it's the next one but i did get some documents We'll be right back. bloomberglive.com slash bloomberghousemiami. First of all, what are these previously processed records? So I get these pre-processed documents. Yeah. And a lot of them have, they have stamps on them that indicate certain lawsuits that they were released like during those lawsuits. You probably notice it on your documents. It'll have like the, you know, 23 CV 1222 or whatever the case number, right? Okay. So first item, Chicago Sun-Times editorials, Thursday, December 25th, 1975. Oh man. Wow. So this is a news clipping. Okay. They do love their news clippings. The headline is there's hope for Santa Claus. And then it explains we've gotten letters from children asking the old question, is there a Santa Claus? It's tempting to give the old answer, but we've been uneasy about that. Maybe it's a little too unspecificated. Anyway, they're sort of talking about how to respond to the question of whether there's a Santa Claus in a Sun-Times editorial. And they've only given us the first page, so I don't know what the rest of it says. But here is the super interesting part of that. There's a note, a handwritten little note that somebody puts in there, okay? Next to the headline, there's hope for Santa Claus. It says, correct, but not for the Republican Party. Oh my God. Wow. Wait, wait, wait. So this is obviously during Nixon's tenure in office. 1975. No, this would have been, I think, Ford is wrapping up. Right. So Nixon resigns in 74. So Ford is in office at this point. And somebody believes that while there may be hope for Santa Claus, there's no hope for the oh my god 75 but wait they added this to a file yeah like we don't know where this document originated we know that for some reason it was produced in this other lawsuit yeah and as as it turns out i went and looked up the case number that's stamped on it it's one of my cases get out of here yeah yeah wait wait yeah so this was already released to you or your client well this Yeah, this had already been released to the, and this is page 3,114 of a production to a different client. Yeah, okay. Voluminous records there. Church committee? I mean, in 75, the church committee did issue their report in 1975. I think that's what it is. We did a case for church committee records, and I think that clipping for some reason must have been in there. And one of the revelations of the committee include Operation MKUltra, which involved the drugging of U.S. citizens as part of mind control, human experiments. I mean, you could see how potentially they would recruit Santa Claus into those kinds of efforts. Right. I mean, what a perfect cover too, right? I'm Santa Claus. Yeah. I want to give children gifts. Instead, I'm installing bugs in people's houses. Right. Exactly. Yeah. So that's document number one. Document number two. This is, it looks like a magazine article. So it's another press clipping and it's called the CIA and the shake. The agency coddled Omar Abdel Rahman, allowing him to operate in the U S now this unholy alliance has blown up in our faces. Now this doesn't have a lawsuit number on it, but it must've been produced in response to somebody else's request. And it looks like the article was published according to the little note they put on here on March 30th, 1993. So I did a little research and it looks like this article is from the Village Voice. It was written five weeks after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. And Omar Abdel Rahman that they're writing about was later convicted and jailed for that. This article was 13 pages long, which is more than half of the 25 pages the FBI sent me. Wow. So you're probably thinking, well, what does this have to do with Santa Claus, right? Yeah, I was just going to say, what's the Santa reference in that one? Yeah, so you got to go way deep into the document and still going, still going. Here we go, like well into it. It says, the sheik then moved entirely to the El Salaam mosque in Jersey City. The founder of the mosque is Sultan Ibrahim El-Gawali, a wealthy 55-year-old Egyptian businessman who was convicted by a federal jury in July 1986 for conspiring to export 150 pounds of C4 plastic explosives to Israel for use by the PLO in a Christmas bombing. Oh, man. El-Gawali, who sports a full white Santa Claus beard. served 18 months in prison before returning to Jersey City. So that's all we got is a reference to Santa Claus. So that's number two. So wait, I just need to ask, are these all news clippings? Is that what they essentially gave you? Yes, everything is news clippings, which I find old news clippings in government files to be really interesting Oh so do I Especially the ones where they do leave notations on the clippings Oh yeah That great And these handwritten notations And they think they so funny They just think they so funny All right. Next up is a website called The Ruckus Society. Oh, I like that. And it's an article from the St. Petersburg Times. The headline is, A Boot Camp for Rebellion. It's from March of 2000. It looks like it's been republished on the Ruckus Society website. And for some reason that we don't know, the FBI took some kind of interest in this and put it in a file. There's a line in here that I really like. These spring breakers aren't working on their tans. They're gathered along the Peace River to learn how best to stage a protest. So here's the Santa Claus reference. I heard this was the place to be, said Sarah Austin, 21, who with four fellow American university students spent 19 hours driving a rattle trap van from Washington, D.C., Austin had altered a Santa Claus shirt to say, I believe in sabotage. And plans to be part of the World Bank protest. Oh, man. I thought I was going to say, I believe in Satan. I mean, if you're altering a Santa Claus shirt, seems that you just rearranged the letters. Yeah. All right. So, obviously, those were interesting documents, but they still were not what I asked for. And the FBI insisted that if I wanted something else, I had to make a new request, which I shouldn't have had to do, but I did it anyway. And on January 30th, 2024, I make a new request for the five most recently dated records resulting from a main file CRS index search for the term Santa Claus. You may limit this to 10 pages. The five most recently dated records resulting from a cross-reference CRS index search for the term Santa Claus. You may limit this to 39 pages. So 49 total pages, Jason, what does that make you think of? Oh, you're trying to keep it under 50 pages so you can stay in what you might call the simple track, which theoretically allows for faster processing. Yeah, exactly. You know, like, let's keep the momentum going. Did you tell them that you did not want previously processed records or are you saying? No, I just said I want the records resulting from the particular search that I asked for. which should be the easiest way to make a request. And I'm expecting like, oh, this should be pretty easy, right? Nope. February 27th, 2024. Please be advised that unusual circumstances apply to the processing of your request. Unusual circumstances include one or more of the following scenarios. And then like stuff about searching and consulting, these unusual circumstances will delay our ability to make a determination on your request within 20 days. So they made this complicated. I indulged them and made a new request. And then they hit me with unusual circumstances. This totally reminds me of what Mike Sarich was saying. Yeah, Mike was on the episode previous to this one. He's a former FOIA officer. And he talked a lot about how FOIA officers, if they don't have enough experience or confidence, they're going to err on the side of withholding documents instead of producing, which is exactly the opposite of what the statute is supposed to make happen. And that's exactly what happened here with your request to the FBI. I mean, how long would it have taken for them to do the search you outlined? Like, go to the search query box, type in Santa Claus, press enter, and look at the results. I mean, they could have been done in like a minute. The weird thing is that they went back and forth with you with like a series of letters needing more information. But that's why I also think, or I made that comment, like I think they were messing with you because they send you this letter. Maybe they didn't realize that you're an attorney. They ask you for more info. They then get a letter back providing them with more info. So they were spending more time communicating with you than actually doing a search and locating these documents. Oh, absolutely. I mean, just reading my email took longer than it would have taken to go just like run this search. The FBI did not respond to our request for comment. But Matt, this is something we need to get to the bottom of. I mean, what if you find out that the FBI has a pretty robust investigation into Kris Kringle, aka Santa Claus? I mean, maybe they wanted to know, is he real? The FBI, for the benefit of our national security, may feel they need to know that. Yeah. Or maybe they think he's some sort of a communist, you know, agitator, giving toys to everyone who's good. I mean, come on. That's just communism, Jason. It is. But it is a good request. It's worth it. I mean, we sort of joke about this when someone prominent passes away suddenly. And, you know, my reaction is to immediately file a request for their FBI file. And certainly in some instances, there are records that may relate to an investigation or it's a cross-reference file. But there's also evidence showing that they just have files on everyone, you know? Yes. Yeah. And that's the reality. Yeah. And that's why I am really eager to see what do they have where they actually were focused on Santa Claus, at least as a cross-reference. Because, I mean, he sees you when you're sleeping. He knows when you're awake. You could see how maybe there's some Santa Claus FBI collaboration that they just don't want us to know about. I did eventually get a response back, Jason, and let me tell you about it. Dear Matthew Topic, this is in response to your Freedom of Information Privacy Act FOIPA request. Based on the information you provided, we conducted a main and reference entity record search of the central record system per our standard search policy. However, we were unable to identify records subject to the FOIPA that are responsive to the request. Therefore, your request is being closed. And then some like additional verbiage after that. Okay, can I just stop you for a second here? they said we conducted a main and cross-reference search per our standard search policy. That is not usually their standard search policy. Sometimes they will say we've conducted a main file search and if you want a cross-reference search you know you gotta then request it all over again. Wait are you saying they might still be messing with me and that they never actually did a cross-reference search. Yeah. So I would appeal this. So there's one other thing here, though, too, that it says they were unable to identify records subject to the FOIPA, so subject to FOIA. So there is this quirky little provision that says if revealing the existence of records would jeopardize an investigation, they can just say that there are no records. They don't even have to do a regular Glomar and say we can't admit or deny. They just can kind of treat them like they don't exist. So it could be that there are records about Santa, but they're using that provision because they do not want Santa Claus to know that they're hot on his trail. We can't rule that possibility out. Like, we literally cannot rule that possibility out. I mean, these are tumultuous times. Who knows what will happen this Christmas with Santa? You know, he may get busted for going into people's houses. this DOJ will not tolerate breaking and entering by people by communists dressed in red delivering toys to people who didn't pay for them like what what is this socialistic thing that's going on here also tariffs can we just like say that like you know toys are expensive now because a tariff i don't know how santa's uh gonna do it so you get you go underneath the tree there's a box but then there's also like four thousand dollar tariff charge yeah sorry kids uh this year you're gonna have to pay me all right well as always is the case with us one thing leads to another thing leads to another thing so we'll see what we turn up all right happy holidays brother happy holidays see y'all in the new year watch this space from Bloomberg and No Smiling this is Disclosure the show is hosted by Matt Topic and me Jason Leopold it's produced by Heather Schroering and Sean Cannon for No Smiling our editor for Bloomberg is Jeff Brokott our executive producers for Bloomberg are Sage Bauman and me Jason Leopold and our executive producers for No Smiling are Sean Cannon, Heather Schroering and Matt Topic The Disclosure theme song is by Nick, with additional music by Nick and Epidemic Sound. Sound design and mixing is by Sean Cannon. For more transparency news and important document dumps, you can subscribe to my weekly FOIA Files newsletter at bloomberg.com slash FOIA Files. That's F-O-I-A Files. To get every episode early on Apple Podcasts, become a bloomberg.com subscriber today. Check out our special intro offer right now at Bloomberg.com slash podcast offer or click the link in the show notes. You'll also unlock deep reporting, data and analysis from reporters around the world. We'll see you again next Tuesday. Matt, I don't think I've ever received an invite to that holiday office party. You might be a little cold for you, but I would love to have you. I mean, I probably would decline, but, you know, I would like the invite. So that's OK. You got it, buddy. risks, and opportunities in private credit. Join the conversation and register today at bloomberglive.com slash invest.