A journalist and a researcher have sued the Justice Department for access to the FBI's records on the late investigative journalist Michael Hastings. The FBI failed to respond to separate Freedom of Information Act requests for records on Hastings submitted by journalist Jason Leopold of Al-Jazeera and Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher Ryan Shapiro. Hours before his death, Hastings sent a mass email to colleagues that he was working on something big and the feds were interviewing his close friends and associates. He said in the email, "I'm onto a big story, and need to go off the radat [sic] for a bit," confirmed one of the recipients, BuzzFeed editor Ben Smith. Less than 24 hours later, he died in a single-car, early morning crash in Los Angeles.
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