According to this AP article, the Justice Department is maintaining that the White House Office of Administration is not subject to the Freedom of Information Act.

The argument for this seems to be that the OA is not an agency” as defined by FOIA. But in the past year, the Office of Administration has processed 65 FOIA requests, as AP reports. The OA also replied to one of our FOIA’s this year asking for correspondence logs, although a letter sent to us stated that OA conducted a search and found no OA records responsive to your request.”

This Justice Department reply comes in response to the lawsuit filed by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a D.C. watchdog group, (and a Sunlight grantee) after their FOIA request to find out about the five million missing e-mails was denied.