HB 160 — FOIA; officers, employees, or members of a public body, alleged willful and knowing violations.
VA 20261 session
Virginia Freedom of Information Act; officers, employees, or members of a public body; alleged willful and knowing violations; mitigating factors to be considered. Specifies that civil penalties may only be imposed on officers, employees, or members of a public body in actions brought against them in their individual capacity for certain violations of the Virginia Freedom of Information Act. The bill further requires a court, when determining whether an officer, an employee, or a member of a public body has committed certain violations of the Virginia Freedom of Information Act willfully and knowingly, to consider certain mitigating factors, including good faith reliance on (i) opinions of the Attorney General; (ii) court cases substantially supporting such officer's, employee's, or member's actions; (iii) advisory opinions of the Virginia Freedom of Information Advisory Council; and (iv) advice of counsel for the public body, as evidence that such officer, employee, or member did not willfully and knowingly commit such violation. Current law provides any officer, employee, or member of a public body the right to introduce at any proceeding regarding such willful and knowing violation a copy of a relevant advisory opinion issued by the Virginia Freedom of Information Advisory Council. This bill is a recommendation of the Boyd-Graves Conference.
Latest action: — Continued
Sponsors (1)
- Marcus B. Simon (D, VA) — sponsor
Action timeline (5)
- · house · H4020 —
- · house · H1101 —
- · house · H1112 —
- · house · H1143 —
- · house · H1140 —
Text versions (0)
No text versions on file yet — same ingest as the action timeline populates these. Each version has direct links to the XML / HTML / PDF at govinfo.gov.
Bill text (extracted)
Amendments
Congressional Research Service briefs (0)
CRS reports that cite this bill in their relatedMaterials — what Congress was reading on the topic. Click any report for its summary, formats, and bill-citation walk.
No CRS reports cite this bill yet.
Connected on the graph
1 typed relationship in the influence graph — 0 inbound, 1 outbound, grouped by type.
referred to committee (1)
| date | dir | entity | amount | role | source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| — | → | HGL Sub: Procurement/Open Government | — | va-leg |
Who matters on this bill
Who matters
Members ranked by combined influence on this bill: role (sponsor 5 / cosponsor 1), capped speech count from the Congressional Record, and recorded-vote engagement.
| # | Member | Role | Speeches | Voted | Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Marcus B. Simon (D, state_lower VA) | sponsor | 0 | — | 5 |
Stance (positions taken)
Predicted vote
Aggregated from: actual roll-call votes (when present) → sponsor → cosponsor → party median (predicts YES when ≥25% of the caucus sponsored/cosponsored). Each row labels its confidence tier so you can see why a position was predicted.
0 predicted yes (0%) · 543 predicted no (100%) · 0 unknown (0%)
By party: · R: 0 yes / 277 no · D: 0 yes / 263 no · I: 0 yes / 3 no
Timeline
Every typed-graph event involving this entity, newest first. Each row is one edge in the influence graph; the inline strip under the row shows the counterpart's own context (a bill's latest action, a hearing's chamber + date, a filing's form type + filed date, a clip's source + excerpt) so the timeline reads like a Wikipedia citation rail.
- 2026-05-24 · was referred to HGL Sub: Procurement/Open Government · va-leg