Probably best to back up a tick: FOIA applies only to executive agency records. Congressional records are a different creature entirely (as are presidential records), enjoying greater privacy protections. But not every document that has been created by or sent to Congress qualifies as a congressional record.

“There has to be an expression of intent by Congress to treat a particular record or group of records as something that is a congressional record—that it belongs to Congress and is only being given to an agency for a specific purpose,” explained Lee Steven, assistant vice president with Cause of Action Institute, a pro-transparency, anti-big government nonprofit. “What the courts have in the past said is that you can’t put a blanket, before-the-fact designation” on such a broad category. As such, Steven told me, Hensarling’s directive is an egregious, possibly illegal case of overreach.

Hensarling’s letter to Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin wound up in the press for all to peruse. The chairman indeed appears intent on sweeping all agency communications with his committee out of the public eye. (I reached out to multiple Republican Finance staffers about this. No one responded.) This would include not just memos to or from the committee or documents generated by an agency in response to a committee request. Hensarling also wants to reclassify pre-existing agency records that are compiled and sent over to the Hill for any reason.

Basically, if anyone at an agency is interacting with the finance committee in any way, Hensarling wants to make sure that you can’t find out any details about it.

You can see how this might not be great in terms of promoting government accountability.

In early May, 21 good-government groups sent an open letter to Hensarling, asking him to rescind his directive. CoAI took it a step farther, issuing a FOIA request to the Department of Justice—which oversees FOIA compliance for all agencies—for any interaction the department may have had with the Finance Committee on this issue. The Department of Justice has so far ignored that request, prompting CoAI to file a lawsuit aimed at goosing it to comply.

To clarify: CoAI is not some lefty resistance group looking to make life hard for a Republican administration or Congress. It is generally considered a conservative organization. (The liberal Media Matters huffed in 2015 when CoAI was annoying the Obama White House: “The group has received funding from the Koch brothers' financial network, and its [now former] executive director worked for Charles Koch and for the House Oversight Committee under Republican Rep. Darrell Issa.”)

So to review: What you have here is a conservative group suing a conservative Justice Department for ignoring a FOIA request concerning a conservative House chairman’s efforts to kneecap FOIA.