Malicious Compliance

I used to be a military officer, and every once in awhile I would give an order that wasn't quite what it should have been.  My troops would sometimes do malicious compliance by following the order exactly like it was given without regard to what they might have thought it meant.  That is the idea behind malicious compliance, and we have the best example of it in a long time in the redaction of documents Judicial Watch filed suit to get from the FBI. 

I read through all of these documents and noted the number of redaction of content i.e. the part of the email below the subject line.  In about 1/3 of these documents the content was completely redacted.  So these guys, being smart-asses, decided to leave the addressees in place (though some of them were redacted too), any disclaimers for general email, and redacted the content.  That kind of email doesn't do anybody any good and they must know that.  Still, they complied by sending the email anyway.  It was obviously malicious compliance. 

There were some duplicates of this kind of nonsense, which makes less sense than having all the content redacted.  Sometimes the content contained a sentence with no other information that would tell a reader what the subject actually was.  That is malicious too. 

I have to give Judicial Watch some credit for seeing this kind of thing through.  It must be frustrating, which is the purpose behind malicious compliance.  Congress is having the same kind of redactions in materials they are seeking about the run-up to the establishment of a Special Counsel.  The FBI has excuses for their way of redacting, but none of them make real sense.  We saw in previous exchanges that redactions were made to protect the FBI and not to protect a source or something classified.  That is called an abuse of power.  Malicious compliance is too.