Background

On January 13, 2017, Tamara Keith of KRWG/NPR reported the following:

The website at the Office of Government Ethics went down Friday afternoon, apparently overwhelmed with traffic, as the agency and its director found themselves at the heart of a growing political fight.

OGE website administrator Michael Hanson told NPR’s Danielle Kurtzleben the site failure came as a result of the usually sleepy office’s website receiving 1 million visitors in just the last three days.

Normally, it gets about 300,000 — in an entire year.

There’s a reason the website’s traffic has spiked. The office’s director, Walter Shaub Jr., has been conducting an unusually public discussion about ethics with the president-elect and the people he has chosen for his Cabinet.

Shortly after this article, I filed a FOIA request on January 16th, 2017, for documents relating to this crash.

I received the following packet of documents on February 15, 2017.