UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA YANPING CHEN, Plaintiff, v. Case No. 20-mc-107 (CRC) FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION, et al., Defendants. MEMORANDUM OPINION U.S. Army Chief Warrant Officer Stephen J. Rhoads moves to quash a subpoena served on his cell phone service provider, T-Mobile, by Dr. Yanping Chen. Dr. Chen is the plaintiff in a related Privacy Act lawsuit against several federal agencies, in which she alleges that personal records seized from her home by the Federal Bureau of Investigation were unlawfully leaked to Fox News. Mr. Rhoads is a non-party to the Privacy Act case who cooperated in the FBI’s investigation of Chen and communicated with Fox News about her. Believing that Rhoads may have been involved in the alleged leak, Chen seeks access to logs of Rhoads’s phone calls and text messages from December 2012 to the present. Rhoads contends that the subpoena is an unjustified intrusion on his privacy. The Court will enforce the subpoena in part but modify it to reduce the burden on Rhoads’s privacy. Specifically, the Court will narrow the subpoena to cover a shorter span of time and provide Rhoads an opportunity to seek redactions of irrelevant personal material before the communication logs are provided to Chen under a protective order. This disposition endeavors to balance Rhoads’s legitimate privacy concerns with Chen’s right to obtain relevant third-party discovery in her Privacy Act case. I. Background The following facts are alleged in Chen’s Privacy Act complaint or drawn from the record in the instant discovery proceeding. Chen is a naturalized citizen of the United States and the founder of the University of Management and Technology (“UMT”), an educational institution that historically attracted a significant number of military servicemembers who attended with tuition assistance from the Department of Defense (“DOD”). Compl. ¶¶ 12-13, 42, Chen v. FBI, 18-cv-3074 (CRC). Rhoads is a U.S. Army officer and a former employee of UMT. Rhoads Decl. ¶¶ 4-5. Starting in 2010, Chen was the focus of an FBI investigation concerning statements she made on immigration forms about her work in China in the 1980s. Compl. ¶ 15. In December 2012, the FBI executed search warrants for Chen’s home and her office at UMT. Id. ¶ 18. The FBI allegedly collected large volumes of personal and business records during these searches, including family photographs. Id. ¶ 20. The parties agree that Rhoads cooperated in the FBI investigation. Rhoads Mem. in Support of Mot. to Quash 5; Opp. 2-3. Rhoads informed DOD of the FBI investigation in 2013. Jones Decl. Exh. 2, ECF No. 18-3. Later, he sent at least two emails to other DOD employees containing what could be construed as references to a forthcoming news media report about Chen. First, on September 8, 2014, he wrote to another Army officer, “The DoD just signed a new [Memorandum of Understanding] with UMT back in July, that would allow . . . Chen to continue her current operation for another 5 years. I aim to stop that ...
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