>>> The original Memory Hole operated from 2002 to 2009. I launched this sequel site in June. Here's a look at some of my favorite material from the first half-year:
+ A gallery of material deleted by Trump and his team: tweets, transition material, campaign promises.... This page is only going to grow. [here]
+ Casting a wider net subject-wise, the Deleted Tweets page archives the best disappeared material from politicians, officials, and government agencies who changed their minds on Twitter. [here]
+ Politico secured the release of previously unseen photos of Trump and then-President Bill Clinton, but they chose to release only 8 of them, including one lewd one that they cropped. I posted all 22, uncropped, plus the contact sheets. [here]
+ For the first time online, over 3,100 pages of documents from and about the Trump Foundation "charity" [here]
+ VP Mike Pence gave Hillary a hard time about her penchant for hiding emails. Fair enough. But when Pence was required to release emails from his office as Indiana Governor, he went to court to fight it. That fight is still going on, but thanks to the MemHole2, you can see what Pence has grudgingly released so far. [here]
+ Speaking of hypocrisy, retired CIA chief Gen. David Petraeus once smuggled top-secret material out of the agency and gave it to his mistress, for a biography of him that she was writing. Yet Trump seriously considered Petraeus for Secretary of State. You can see the most crucial documents from his prosecution for mishandling classified material. [here]
+ As soon as Trump named Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn to be his National Security Advisor, the website for Flynn's private
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intelligence/consulting business went AWOL. It's not even in the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, but I grabbed pieces of it before it disappeared from Google's cache. [here]
+ Similarly, when Fox News personality K.T. McFarland was named Deputy National Security Advisor, she yanked down her entire online presence. I posted some of it. [here]
+ The Pentagon pulled down a video of the Guantanamo Commander saying that he would refuse an order from Trump to torture detainees. Now you can watch it yourself. [here]
+ Honestly, the Memory Hole 2 doesn't take sides. I believe all authority is corrupt and hypocritical. For their pay-to-play exposé, the Associated Press sued the State Department for Hillary Clinton's detailed schedules as Secretary of State. The AP reported on the documents but didn't post them, so I did. All 6,500 pages. [here]
+ The public had never seen the inside of the Border Patrol's primitive, filthy detention centers. When a judge unsealed photos in a class-action lawsuit, some media outlets posted a handful of them. The Memory Hole 2 posted all 200. [here and here]
+ In an unexpected move 10 years ago, the Defense Department posted audio of the tribunals of 14 "high-value" Guantanamo detainees, including Khalid Shaykh Muhammad, the supposed mastermind of 9/11. It didn't take long before those recordings were pulled offline, but The Memory Hole 2 has them. [here]
+ Soon after launching, The Memory Hole 2 broke the news—obtained via a FOIA request—that the federal government is funding studies on the benefits on cannabis. [here]
+ It took the New York Times three years to win the release of audio of the 911 emergency calls from inside the Twin Towers on 9/11. Then they posted a few clips and called it a day. The Memory Hole 2 posted every bit of them—all 15 CDs—for the first time anywhere. [here]
+ All 567 federally recognized Native American tribes have a constitution, yet most of them have never been posted online. After a professor won a court battle to secure the release of more than 400 of them from the Department of the Interior, I kept waiting for them to appear online. They never did, so I requested and posted them. [here]
+ Most government agencies are required to prepare briefings for the incoming administration's transition team. I filed dozens of FOIA requests to collect 'em all. [here]
+ NORAD's command center deep inside Cheyenne Mountain is the stuff of legend, and photos are hard to come by. Drawing on two almost-unobtainable sources, The Memory Hole 2 posted 20 photos, plus some maps and illustrations. [here]
+ Scholar and activist Vera Wilde amassed 30 internal documents about polygraphs from the CIA, FBI, Pentagon, and others. They were in two places online, but both disappeared. The MemHole2 brought them back, with a new intro to the saga from Vera. [here]
+ The Justice Department keeps deleting documents about the controversial practice of asset forfeiture, and I keep reposting them [here and here].
+ The past is prologue. I looked back at what the Bush Administration pulled offline (which the original Memory Hole preserved): material from the FDA, Justice Department, Air Force, Civil Rights Commission, and other agencies. I expect that Bush's deletions will be child's play compared to what happens under Trump. [here]
+ Found in a Federal Depository Library, the Drug Enforcement Administration's 1979 coloring book Soozie Says, "ONLY SICK PEOPLE NEED DRUGS !" is horrible on every level. [here]
+ Some of my other favorites:
- all the documents from the abandoned rape lawsuit against Trump [here]
- over 4,000 pages of documents about the Flint water debacle [here]
- a list of fracking chemicals that was buried in a government report [here]
- a list of tech companies that the CIA's In-Q-Tel has invested in [here]
- FEMA's deleted reports from Hurricane Katrina [here]
- the Navy's remote-controlled sharks [here]
- a link collection of transparency reports from 50+ tech companies [here]
- Maine Governor LePage's hair-raising, expletive-filled voicemail [here]
- the Justice Department's forgotten FOIA cartoon [here]
- archived versions of 1,000 missing .gov sites [here]
- scanned manuscripts from master-cryptologist and martyr Alan Turing [here]
- recipes from prisons across the US [here]
- almost 50 years of complaints against the Chicago Police [here]
- Canada's supposedly classified report on fighter jets [here]
2017 promises to be quite a year. I already have hundreds upon hundreds of documents to post, and no doubt the Trump administration will keep me busy recovering deleted material. I'll be broadening my scope to include more material from US cities and foreign countries. And I have hundreds of FOIA requests in the works, with more filed all the time, and I'll be focusing heavily on Trump and his administration.
I hope that you'll support my work with a donation.
Header photo by Judit Klein