OPINION & ORDER Plaintiffs The Intercept Media Inc. and Ryan Devereaux — respectively, the publisher of The Intercept news site and a reporter at The Intercept (collectively, the “Intercept”) — bring this action against the United States National Park Service and the Department of the Interior (collectively, the “NPS”) under the Freedom of Information Act (“FOIA”), 5 U.S.C. §552 et seq. They seek disclosure of records related to an investigation by the NPS’s Office of Professional Responsibility (the “OPR”) in connection with the January 2022 killing of a gray wolf near the northern boundary of the Yellowstone National Park (“Yellowstone”). The NPS has released approximately 50 pages of the 296-page investigative file, but it has all but completely redacted the balance, citing privacy-related exemptions to its disclosure duty under FOIA. The Intercept challenges the NPS’s near-blanket redactions as significantly overbroad. Pending now are the parties’ cross-motions for summary judgment pursuant to Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 56. For the reasons that follow, the Court grants each motion in part and denies each in part and directs the NPS to review the investigative file anew, guided by the analysis herein of the NPS’s FOIA obligations. That review, the Court expects, will result in a substantially more fulsome production of records to plaintiffs. I. Background A. Factual Background 1. Gray Wolves in Yellowstone The Intercept’s FOIA request was made in the context of — and to shed light upon — an ongoing public policy debate over federal and state efforts to regulate wolf hunting, following the recovery of the gray wolf, from near-extinction, in the Northern Rockies. The gray wolf once ranged over most of the lower 48 states. See 74 Fed. Reg. 15,123, 15,123-25 (Apr. 2, 2009). During the first half of the 20th century, however, intensive hunting and loss of prey and habitat decimated its population. See Dkt. 31 4 (“MacNulty Decl.”). By the 1960s, it teetered on the brink of extinction. Id. In 1973, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (the “FWS”) listed the northern Rocky Mountain gray wolf as an “endangered” species, bringing it within the protections of the Endangered Species Act (the “ESA”), 16 U.S.C. §1531 et seq. See 38 Fed. Reg. 14,678,14,678 (June 4, 1973). The ESA, in general, makes it unlawful for any person to “take any [endangered] species within the United States.” 16 U.S.C. §1538(a)(1)(B); id. §1532(19) (“The term ‘take’ means to harass, harm, pursue, hunt, shoot, wound, kill, trap, capture, or collect, or to attempt to engage in any such conduct.”); see also id. §1533(d) (empowering FWS to issue regulations “as necessary and advisable” to “provide for the conservation of [endangered] species”). Beginning in 1995, the FWS trapped wolves in Canada for release into Yellowstone, as part of a broader effort to promote the survival of the gray wolf. See MacNulty Decl.
4-5. Over the ensuing 30 years, gray wolves have gradually reoccupied lost habitat across the Northern Rockies, and their population has rebounded. Id.
