Fannie Mae-No Politics (FNMA)

[Dollars1]

Even without this fundamental and irreconcilable disconnect between the Government’s treatment of the March 20 Log and its very different treatment of its previous logs, the Govern- ment’s effort to shroud the March 20 Log in secrecy would be unprecedented. In fact, Plaintiffs are aware of no reported decision holding, over another party’s objection, that a run-of-the-mill privilege log like the March 20 Log should be treated as a protected document. When one adds in the fact that the log that the Government seeks to treat as confidential is essentially indistin- guishable from the multiple unprotected logs that the Government had previously produced, the unprecedented and inappropriate nature of the Government’s actions is obvious. The courts have already criticized litigants’ increasing tendency to over-designate discovery materials as confi- dential.1 The Government has now taken that practice to new, and disturbing, heights. For these reasons, as more fully explained below, the Court should enter an order requir- ing the Government to remove the Protected Information designation from the March 20 Log. In addition, because the Government is continuing to produce privilege logs on a rolling basis, thus raising the likelihood that similar disputes will arise in the future, the Court should direct the Government that it should not designate future privilege logs as protected unless they contain in- formation that meets the definition of Protected Information, in which case the Government should also produce a redacted version of the privilege log.2