On May 21, 2026, Federal District Court Judge Matthew Kennelly made history. Very few civil lawsuits go to trial. And when it comes to those brought under the Freedom of Information Act, the number each year is even smaller.
Indeed, a 2011 study by Margaret Kwoka shows that for nine years, the number was exactly zero.
cont.
The underlying requests are connected to reporting I did a few years ago, when I discovered Underwood had introduced a bill purporting to be for an electronic health records database and for the benefit of migrant children. The truth was very different, as I explained here in 2019 and then in more detail in early 2020, in an article co-authored with John Washington and published in The Intercept.
In the summer of 2020, Rep. Underwood was at it again. Following our reporting, the Senate did not pass Underwood's bill, and Underwood updated her campaign finance disclosure, confirming our information that she had underreported her payouts from the kleptocratic NextLevel insurance firm, after she refused to comment on this for our article.
Underwood may have been lackadaisacal in her financial disclosures, but her diligence on behalf of the surveillance indstury would be rewarded: the House leadership in 2020 promoted the second term member of Congress to the powerful House Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security. In her new position, she introduced her surveillance industry bill, again using the framing of "health" to fund a project that creates a massive biometric database, provides no health benefits to migrants, and was opposed the immigrant rights groups in 2019.
Underwood's persistence as a corporate lackey prompted my curiosity. She ran as a nurse and a health care advocate, but in her first term was Vice Chair of the Homeland Security Committee and on no health services committees.
What exactly had been going on with NextLevel?, I wondered.
A few years and more state court litigation later, I had some answers. The long story of an insurance executive who campaigned as a nurse, in nurses scrubs and a stethsoscope, is here. (My shorthand description of Underwood: "the George Santos of Illinois.")
The records provide a case study of what happens to billions of taxpayer funds that are targeted for health care, showing how they end up in the pockets of Underwood and her bosses and not the health care providers for the Medicaid enrollees in Cook County, Illinois, in this case.
The account above also has links to previously sealed records unredacted following my First Amendment litigation, as well as a link to the litigation. (In short, the firm was secretly declared insolvent, and the public has no idea about what happened to hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars, though we do now know some of the players who made this happen, including a Chicago Tribune CEO and officials at the Fortune 50 firm Centene that took over NextLevel's membership and contracts during secret conservation proceedings.
Meanwhile, I was waiting on responses to some FOIA requests. Prior to working for NextLevel, Underwood had been working for Health and Human Services, including at one point on insurance markets. Wouldn't it be interesting to see exactly what Underwood was up to in her first years in the Obama administration, before revolving into the industry whose rules it appeared she was earlier creating?
As often is the case, the agencies originally provided exactly nothing. And then, even after litigation, the FOIA searches seemed more concerned with avoiding than locating responsive records.
In another FOIA case for this same proceeding, Judge Kennelly found against Immigration and Customs Enforcement and ordered they release in their entirety thousands of pages without redactions. ICE appealed. The appeal is fully briefed and we are awaiting an order. (You can read an overview of the issues for that and another case now also on appeal in our motion to consolidate.) The motion was denied, but it was referenced by Judge Kness in a recent hearing for another case and provides a synoposis of the problems with our current FOIA case law.
Many thanks to the amazing attorneys representing me in this litigation: Nicolette Glazer, Rima Kapitan, Dan Melo, and Andrew Free.
