Plaintiff in FOIA lawsuit won't accept former Dolton Mayor Tiffany Henyard's affidavit
An attorney for former Dolton Mayor Tiffany Henyard agreed Wednesday to amend an affidavit Henyard filed stating she does not possess documents sought through the Freedom of Information Act after the organization suing her claimed it did not meet state standards.
Henyard's attorney, Beau Brindley, reached the agreement ahead of Wednesday's hearing held via Zoom after Cook County Judge Kate Moreland said Henyard would be fined $1,000 for each day she failed to either produce documents requested by the nonprofit Edgar County Watchdogs, or submit an affidavit explaining she didn't possess them.
Despite being filed Tuesday, the affidavit is 'deficient … and must be disregarded,' attorneys for the Edgar County Watchdogs said in a response filed Wednesday. They said the affidavit does not include a certificate that it was made under penalty of perjury and that it lacks both specificity and credibility.
Brindley said he had already begun amending the affidavit to meet the requirements and would work with the Edgar County Watchdogs' attorneys to ensure both sides were satisfied before filing the amended document.
'We can try to fix this thing so we can get it resolved, which is in everybody's best interest,' Brindley said.
Edward 'Coach' Winehaus, one of the attorneys representing the Edgar County Watchdogs, told the Daily Southtown via email that he believes Moreland's fines will remain in effect until the amended affidavit is filed. That would mean that, as of Tuesday when the first affidavit was filed, Henyard would owe $8,000 in fines.
Henyard was held in contempt of court last month 'for her repeated and flagrant violations of the court's orders' in the lawsuit the Edgar County Watchdogs filed against Dolton for FOIA violations during Henyard's tenure as mayor, according to an order Moreland filed Monday.
At a hearing Friday at the Richard J. Daley Center in Chicago, Brindley told Moreland Henyard no longer had the documents.
The affidavit filed Tuesday explained the steps Henyard took to look for the requested record, a document Henyard held up at a January public meeting as proof that trustees canceled a credit card.
According to the affidavit, Henyard does not recall the document the organization requested or where it came from. She said she did not take any village documents with her when she left office and the document in question would remain in the possession of the village.
'After becoming aware of the requested documents, I searched all of my personal documents to ensure I had nothing related to the January meeting,' Henyard said in the affidavit.
She said she also searched her email with terms related to the January meeting, such as 'credit card' and 'cancelled credit card,' without success, and sent emails to Mayor Jason House and Village Administrator Charles Walls requesting they locate the document. She said neither House nor Walls responded.
'I have no other mechanisms through which to seek a single document, the content of which I simply do not recall,' Henyard said in the affidavit.
The Edgar County Watchdogs' attorneys said the affidavit failed to include steps taken to comply with the FOIA while Henyard was mayor, as was the case when they filed the lawsuit.
'If the 'search' was performed only recently, then the steps she performed when in office — such as potentially destroying the documents — would be available for testimony and
therefore must be included in the affidavit if she hopes to purge the court's contempt order,' the response said.
Edgar County Watchdogs filed its lawsuit in February 2024, a month after failing to receive those records along with copies of all credit card statements since Oct. 1, 2023. Dolton, which since last month has been under House's leadership, complied in providing the credit card statements but said they lacked the document Henyard held up at the January meeting.
The Edgar County Watchdogs claim in the lawsuit the only response to their Jan. 5 FOIA requests came from Village Clerk Alison Key, informing them the village administrator at the time, Keith Freeman, instructed staff not to reply to requests that she entered.
Henyard's tenure as mayor, which ended last month, showed a pattern of ignored or denied public records requests.
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The conservative government watchdog organization Judicial Watch filed a lawsuit against the Justice Department in April over the rejection of a similar FOIA request, which is still pending. The Justice Department hasn't responded to Business Insider's requests for comment. Epstein's hard drives Maxwell's Manhattan criminal trial featured hard drives that might solve a mystery from the Palm Beach investigation into Epstein. During the earlier criminal investigation in Florida, detectives searching Epstein's Palm Beach house found that "six computer hard drives in the house had been hastily removed, leaving dangling wires attached to monitors in several areas of the house," according to Miami Herald reporter Julie K. Brown's book about the investigation. Years later, in Maxwell's trial, one FBI agent testified they found a box full of hard drives while raiding Epstein's Manhattan mansion. Evidence in Maxwell's trial shows that one of the drives contained data from the early 2000s. It's unclear what was on the hard drives removed from the Palm Beach house. Other evidence seized in the 2007 investigation The public doesn't have all the evidence collected during the investigation into Epstein between 2005 and 2007. Palm Beach County has made some of the material public, and other files have surfaced in various civil lawsuits. Much of it remains redacted, partly to protect the privacy of victims. Radar Online filed a lawsuit against the FBI in 2017 seeking to enforce a FOIA request for the material. A federal judge rejected the suit in 2024. It's on appeal. Alan Dershowitz, who represented Epstein during the Palm Beach investigation, has pushed for making the material public. He says the FBI should release any interview notes and recordings that may mention him, and that he waives any privacy concerns. Dershowitz says the records would disprove the sexual misconduct allegations brought against him by Virginia Giuffre. Dershowitz and Giuffre reached a settlement after a long legal battle in which she agreed she may have mistaken him for someone else. Dershowitz said he viewed some of the records as part of a civil lawsuit involving Epstein, but they are sealed. "They're in court. I've seen them," Dershowitz told Business Insider. "And if they were unredacted, they would give you the names of lots of people who were accused — some falsely accused, some truthfully accused." Epstein grand jury records Federal court rules and Justice Department policies sharply limit the disclosure of information from grand jury proceedings. The public doesn't have a full accounting of all the evidence presented to grand juries in Manhattan when prosecutors were preparing indictments against Epstein and Maxwell. Some evidence in the 2006 Florida grand jury was made public last year through litigation, following the passage of a state law pushed by Gov. Ron DeSantis. Investigation into Epstein's death A 2023 Justice Department inspector general report about Epstein's death in the Manhattan Correctional Center concluded that he killed himself. FBI Director Kash Patel and his deputy, Dan Bognino, have backed up the conclusion in media interviews — much to the ire of some right-wing influencers who believe he was murdered. The 128-page report details how the jail failed to prevent Epstein's death, but the Justice Department hasn't released much of the underlying evidence it collected. Mark Epstein, his brother, has demanded data from the 911 call that was supposed to be made after jail officers found Jeffrey Epstein dead. The NYPD said it was unable to find any records of the call when Business Insider asked for them in June 2023 after the release of the report. Business Insider filed a FOIA request with the Justice Department inspector general earlier this year requesting transcripts of interviews with key people around Epstein at the time he died, information about inmate interviews, phone call records, and photos and videos referenced in the report. The office says it has "a backlog of FOIA requests and very limited resources with which to process requests" and hasn't provided a timeline for completion. In recent interviews, Patel and Bognino said the FBI would publish video of the area outside Epstein's cell demonstrating no one else entered it. "There's just no way that you could have run an op and had people go into that cell and not have any video of it," Patel told podcaster Joe Rogan earlier this month. Investigation into Epstein's plea deal The Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility completed a report in 2020 about US Attorney Alexander Acosta's "poor judgment" in granting Epstein a light plea deal for his conduct in 2007. The office has not released all of the underlying evidence for that investigation. Business Insider filed a FOIA request for that information earlier this year, and the agency acknowledged the request without saying if or when it would provide the records. All of the Epstein flight logs While many of Epstein's private flight records were disclosed by the Federal Aviation Administration and through litigation, certain periods have gaps. The US Marshals Service could also publish its documents from its inspections of his planes, which flew between the US Virgin Islands and the US mainland. The FAA and the US Marshals Service did not respond to requests for comment. How the FBI missed Epstein earlier Across several legal complaints, dozens of Epstein victims have alleged that the FBI failed to stop him earlier, ignoring tips and pleas as early as the 1990s. The FBI has not said whether it's in possession of intake forms or other records of those complaints. In court, the Justice Department has avoided answering whether it has looked for them. The agency asked a judge to dismiss the most recent lawsuit, filed in Washington, DC, on procedural grounds. The request is pending. If the FBI were to find records from the 1990s and early 2000s, they could shed more light on what Epstein was doing during that time period, and whether the FBI took any action. "Unfortunately, the FBI continues to fight survivors of Jeffrey Epstein despite their public proclamations otherwise," Jordan Merson, an attorney representing Epstein accusers in the lawsuit, told BI.
