The Democratic Party, eager to dig up damaging material on the GOP before this year’s elections, is flooding the Pentagon with public records requests on a host of White House hopefuls and vulnerable Republican senators, according to documents reviewed by POLITICO.

The party is homing in on current or former officeholders like Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, Jeb Bush and John Kasich, as well as former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, who previously held a perch on a Pentagon advisory board. Democrats so far have left out GOP front-runner Donald Trump and retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, who haven’t held public office and so never had constituents affected by the Defense Department’s military or contracting issues.


The requests, filed under the Freedom of Information Act, mainly seek correspondence between the candidates and Pentagon officials, according to the newly released Defense Department logs. They include demands for letters in which Rubio expressed concerns in 2011 about the Pentagon’s “purchasing practice” relating to a Miami-based company, as well as a 2013 letter from the Florida senator that the logs describe as a “request for assistance to sell beverage to U.S. armed forces.”

In the hyperpartisan age of opposition research and attack ads, Democrats could use such records to try to show inconsistencies in the candidates’ policy positions or raise questions about their efforts to intervene on behalf of campaign donors or friends.

Whether the Democrats have struck pay dirt, however, remains to be seen — and at least some observers doubt that the document dive is more than a fishing expedition.

“Opposition research seems to be a priority for many campaigns,” said Steve Aftergood, a specialist on government records at the Federation of American Scientists and an expert on FOIA. “It is not clear to me that FOIA is a particularly useful tool for that purpose. The turnaround time can be quite long — not just weeks or months but even years.”

Still, this kind of correspondence has been fodder for campaign trail attacks in the past. In 2012, for instance, House Speaker Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, then the Republican vice presidential candidate, found himself in an awkward spot after documents surfaced showing that he had sought economic stimulus funds from the Energy Department for groups in his state — even though he had dismissed President Barack Obama’s $787 billion stimulus program as a “wasteful spending spree.”

In all, the Democratic National Committee has submitted 11 requests under the Freedom of Information Act over the past year to the Pentagon’s main processing center, which handles records for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Office of the Secretary of Defense and a variety of defense agencies, according to a log of FOIA requests.

The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee is also looking to the Pentagon for fodder on Republican senators — including Roy Blunt of Missouri, Mark Kirk of Illinois and Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire — it hopes to unseat in the fall.

In turn, the chief of research at the Republican National Committee told POLITICO that the organization has also submitted FOIA requests seeking communications involving its main electoral target: Hillary Clinton. In all, the RNC submitted 368 Clinton-related FOIA requests in the past year to government entities, including federal agencies and state and local governments.

The Democrats portrayed their document hunt as a no-brainer.

“We request public information from as many sources as possible,” said DNC Research Director Lauren Dillon. “This is simple due diligence.”

What might the Democrats learn? Based on the logs, it appears that Rubio is the targeted Republican who has communicated most with the Pentagon.

For instance, Rubio or his Senate office wrote numerous letters about “concerns regarding security clearance,” a “security clearance issue,” and a “request for assistance with a security clearance appeal” over the course of 2011 to 2013, the logs show. He or his office also sent at least three letters in 2012 that included a “request for assistance with hiring process,” according to the logs, another about “assistance with job placement,” and a request “to staff human smuggling and trafficking center,” an office headquartered at the State Department.

The Pentagon has not yet released copies of the Democrats’ FOIA letters themselves. But its 20-page log of all correspondence between Rubio and defense officials from 2000 to 2015 shows that the Florida Republican, who sits on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, wrote to the Pentagon regarding missile software and personnel issues, inquired about whether space was available on a flight from Turkey to Israel, and asked for help locating the passports of an Army Reserve officer’s spouse and son.

Other Rubio letters sound even more innocuous, such as a request for assistance to correct someone’s military record and information about Agent Orange exposure during the Vietnam War.

Asked whether the Rubio campaign has any concerns about the Democratic research effort, Alex Conant, a spokesman for the Florida senator, responded: “I don’t have any comment on this.”

For the most part, the Pentagon responds to these records requests by releasing lists of all letters sent from the candidate to the Defense Department. The requesters can then follow up by asking for copies of specific letters off the lists.

Meanwhile, the RNC submitted just one request last year to the Pentagon’s main FOIA processing center, the logs show. That sought correspondence between the State Department and senior defense officials regarding potential weapons sales to specific countries.

This appears to be an effort, at least in part, to determine whether the former secretary of state had attempted to influence arms sales to countries that contributed to the Clinton Foundation, a nonprofit established by former President Bill Clinton. The Pentagon is still processing the request.

RNC Research Director Raj Shah said the committee has also sent FOIA requests to other agencies within the Defense Department. The Army, Air Force and Navy, for instance, have their own FOIA processing centers.

“We try to get as much information as possible,” Shah told POLITICO.

In addition, the Florida Democratic Party submitted two requests — for communications between the Pentagon and Republican Reps. Ron DeSantis and Jeff Miller. DeSantis is running for the Senate seat being vacated by Rubio.

