by NLPC Staff | Jul 22, 2026 | Government Integrity Project, Featured News |

National Legal and Policy Center sued the Securities and Exchange Commission on July 15 over records, pursuant to a Freedom of Information Act request made by NLPC, that the agency has withheld for more than a year. Days later, a Homeland Security officer called with questions about alleged threats to federal employees.

This morning an officer with the Federal Protective Service within the Department of Homeland Security contacted Paul Chesser, Director of NLPC’s Corporate Integrity Project and the filer of FOIA requests to the SEC.

The officer identified those requests and raised a concern about threats to federal employees tied to “a website.” He asked whether the site contained any threats.

Chesser told him there are no threats on the site. He confirmed that NLPC filed a FOIA lawsuit, said NLPC wrote about it on nlpc.org, and invited the officer to read it.

NLPC is demanding correspondence between three corporate law firms, nine corporations, and SEC staff who rule on whether companies may discard shareholder proposals before their annual meetings. NLPC suspects collusion between the FOIA request’s subject entities, to secretly negotiate decisions to allow the exclusion of our shareholder proposals, in a process that is supposed to be transparent and disclosed to all involved parties.

Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher is among the subject law firms in the FOIA request. Chairman Paul Atkins (pictured above) recruited a Gibson Dunn partner of 25 years to head the division that issues those rulings, then hired two more attorneys from the firm.

NLPC wrote about that hiring pattern and announced the lawsuit last week.

Someone pointed federal law enforcement toward NLPC’s reporting.

“NLPC does not know who brought its website reporting to the attention of federal law enforcement, or what was alleged, but we are determined to find out,” said Paul Kamenar, NLPC’s counsel who filed the FOIA lawsuit. “It’s outrageous and chilling to NLPC’s mission that its lawful watchdog activities can trigger a federal law enforcement investigation.”