The Federal Communications Commission has denied Freedom of Information Act requests related to the agency’s net neutrality comment periods. The requests, which were filed by The New York Timesand Buzzfeed, were intended to further reporting on two lingering controversies: a large number of faked public comments on the FCC’s net neutrality rollback proposal and a false cyber-attack report that the FCC appears to have used as a cover story for a crash of its online comment system.

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai and the Republican majority of the FCC’s Board of Commissioners (which still has four members rather than the usual five months after Democrat Mignon Clyburn’s resignation) ruled against the FoIA request, with Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel, the Commission’s sole remaining Democrat, dissenting.

Pai defended the decision as a way to protect the privacy of the members of the public who commented on the FCC’s proposal. But the decision certainly seems to help him and the rest of the agency’s Republicans as they face continued scrutiny over issues related to the comission’s comment system in the run-up to the vote that ended major Obama-era net neutrality measures.

Before the FCC’s controversial vote to end net neutrality, the agency invited the public to comment on the matter. It didn’t go well: the comment section was flooded with transparently phony comments in favor of the GOP-backed neutrality rollback, many of which used Russian email addresses and appeared to be Russian “bots.” Then the FCC’s comment system went down — the result, the FCC claimed at the time, of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) cyber-attacks.