MuckRock files requests to over 9000 agencies in all 50 states, and the overwhelming number of our interactions with those agencies is positive, sometimes downright pleasant. Then there’s agencies like the Lexington Police Department in Kentucky.

FOIA is both a vital tool for the public to gain access to government records, and a frustrating process that reveals infuriating facts and sometimes even more infuriating government employees - as well as super helpful public servants who replenish your faith in humanity just enough to keep you filing FOIAs another day.

Here’s the best and worst of some of MuckRock’s recent interactions with the keepers of public information.

After going to prison for embezzling a paltry sum from the German-American Bund, the would-be Führer Fritz Kuhn came up with a plot to con his way into a shorter sentence - only to have it fell apart because his supposed patsy turned him into the FBI.

From defending the man who had blackmailed him out of the Southern Christian Leadership Council to serving as a character witness for Ariel Sharon, records from the Central Intelligence Agency and his Federal Bureau of Investigation file show civil rights icon Bayard Rustin was a man who couldn’t easily be categorized.

One of the frustrating ironies to come out of efforts to collect information on domestic violence is that sometimes the laws meant to protect victims get in the way of obtaining data that could be used to improve services to them.