September 09, 2015 04:24 PM

State of New Jersey

Page: 2 of 2

Government Records Request

Receipt
You filed an OPRA request with the Department of Law and Public Safety (L&PS), Office of the Attorney
General (OAG) seeking access to: "all emails sent and received between the agency's employees and the
email address hen84@aol.com from the dates 1/1/10 to the present."
Your request seeks communications between the Governor and employees of the Office of the Attorney
General, which are subject to the executive privilege, and therefore, are exempt from OPRA. See N.J.S.A.
47:1A-9; see also Wilson v. Brown, 404 N.J. Super. 557 (App. Div. 2009), cert. den. 198 N.J. 473 (2009);
Executive Order No. 26 (McGreevey 2002).
In addition, your request is overbroad because it seeks documents regarding any and all subjects, for an over
five year period, from every employee of OAG over that time period. OPRA does not allow for open-ended
demands for every document a public agency has on file. Spectraserv, Inc. v. Middlesex Cnty. Utilities Auth.,
416 N.J. Super. 565, 576 (App. Div. 2010). Nor does OPRA require a public agency to survey [its]
employees, to conduct [r]esearch, or to review all of its files to select the documents and data that might be
responsive to a broad request. N.J. Builders Assoc. v. N.J. COAH, 390 N.J. Super. 166, 171, 178 (App. Div.
2007). Rather, OPRA requires a party requesting access to a public record to specifically describe the
document sought so that the records may be readily and reasonably identified within the short time frame
within which government custodians must respond. Spectraserv, supra, 416 N.J. Super. at 576 (citation
omitted). A request that is complex because it fails to specifically identify the documents sought . . . is not
encompassed by OPRA. Id. at 577. Therefore, your request is also invalid because it is overbroad.
This response is made without waiver and with a full reservation of rights, including the right to invoke additional
privileges and exemptions that are implicated by your request, including but not limited to the attorney-client
privilege, attorney work product privilege, and the inter-agency or intra-agency advisory, consultative, or
deliberative material exemption under OPRA. See N.J.S.A. 47:1A-1.1.
Your OPRA request is hereby closed.
Sincerely,
Bruce J. Solomon
OAG Custodian of Records
Your request for government records (# W100947) is as follows:
I hereby request all emails sent and received between the agencys employees and the email address
hen84@aol.com, from the dates 1/1/10 to the present. The requested documents will be made available to
the general public, and this request is not being made for commercial purposes. Please search for responsive
records regardless of format. I request the information in a machine-processable format, such as a spreadsheet
(CSV or XLS) or word processor (TXT, DOC, DOCX) format. It can be provided by email, thumb drive, or CD. If
it is unavailable in any other format, an OCRed PDF (i.e. searchable) will do. If it is your position that any
portion of the requested records is exempt from disclosure, I request that you provide it with a Vaughn
Index/privilege log of those documents. In the event some portions of the requested records are properly
exempt from disclosure, please disclose any reasonably segregable non-exempt portions of the requested
records. If it is your position that a document contains non-exempt segments, but that those non-exempt
segments are so dispersed throughout the document as to make segregation impossible, please state what
portion of the document is non- exempt, and how the material is dispersed throughout the document. If a
request is denied in whole, please state specifically that it is not reasonable to segregate portions of the record
for release.