I can't say whether the FBI's intent was nefarious or not, but I used to work for the Fed and have some experience in FOIA as well working with them. First, no

I can't say whether the FBI's intent was nefarious or not, but I used to work for the Fed and have some experience in FOIA as well working with them. First, not all website changes go through some high level review. We had an internal tech team that did our websites. The big stuff would be reviewed, but minor revisions would not necessarily. It's like if you have a personal website and see something that you think could be worded better or weird formatting, you just jump in and change it. It's not clear to me that this is some conspiracy versus someone just cleaning up the page. Second, I'm not sure how this stuff is documented. If someone had sent me a FOIA request asking for some specific documents, that's easy. But how exactly to find documented deletions, I probably would have gone to IT to see if there was any sort of log and whether those logs were saved. Many things are required to be saved under a required Records Retention Schedule, but I'm not clear whether edits to the website fall under this. Third, the people I met in FOIA are generally helpful. If something is worded wrong, they don't just throw out the request, they try to understand what the request was actually looking for and contact the requester. There was a customer service aspect to the job of course. I can't speak for everyone at every agency, but that was my experience. Fourth, in all my experience internally with FOIA and Privacy Act stuff, I never heard once of anyone saying to cover something up or return garbage or anything. Many times something legitimately couldn't be found, but it was never intentional and we tried really hard to make sure things were returned if there was anything responsive.