Are we sure that the FOIA request that Klippenstein published with the Intercept article is legitimate?

Here’s my reasoning:

The Loudon County sheriff’s records office “categorically” assured Grusch they didn’t release the details of his PTSD meltdown.

Curiously, the office is now closed and not responding to inquiries.🤔

HIPAA-sensitive information shouldn’t be released in a FOIA request, per the FOIA laws. It’s not a matter of public record, and is definitely a breach of Grusch’s privacy. Theoretically, the sheriff’s office shouldn’t even have kept that much detail in their logs (and if you look at the 2014 incident vs the 2018 incident, it’s much less detailed), and it shouldn’t have come out under anything less than a subpoena even if they had kept it.

My partner pointed out that an email trail of the kind in the PDF would take no more than 25 minutes for an IT-competent person to fabricate, particularly since half the headers are redacted… We would need to see the original EML files, not a PDF that could just as easily have been typed up in Word as downloaded from Outlook or wherever.

Having a psychological problem is not a crime. Having the police called to your home for any reason is not a crime. The only information that should come out with a FOIA is information about crimes where someone has been charged.

I’m not ready to reject the hypothesis that some spook just handed Klippenstein the relevant documentation and spotted him the $25 for the “””FOIA””” request so that he could make the leak look legitimate. There’s too much about the way it all came out that smells terrible.