Michael Hastings Crash

From a restaurant CCTV security camera. Any car built in the last ten years can be taken over remotely. Requiescat in pace et in amore.

Two investigative journalists are suing the FBI after the government failed to respond on time to a pair of Freedom of Information Act requests filed for details on the death of reporter Michael Hastings.

Jason Leopold and Ryan Shapiro filed a joint suit on Friday after the Federal Bureau of Investigation neglected to respond to their FOIA requests within the 20-working day period required by law.

Leopold and Shapiro both sent FOIA requests to the FBI following Hastings’ untimely death last month, and are now taking legal action in an attempt to expedite pleas that have so far been ignored by the bureau.

Hastings, 33, died last month in Los Angeles, California after his Mercedes C250 Coupé crashed at a high rate of speed in the early morning hours of June 18. Hastings was widely-respected for his hard-hitting brand of national security reporting with outlets ranging from Rolling Stone to Buzzfeed.com, and has been credited with causing the resignation of Stanley McChrystal, the four-star general who headed NATO's International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan until a Hastings-penned expose in 2010 embarrassed him to the point of abandoning that role.

According to a friend, Hastings warned his colleagues over email just hours before his death that he was working on a big story and that the FBI would likely be investigating his associates.

“It alarmed me very much,” Staff Sgt. Joseph Biggs, a friend of Hastings, said of the email he received last month. “I just said it doesn’t seem like him. I don’t know, I just had this gut feeling and it just really bothered me,” he told KTLA News.

The anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks also claimed that Hastings made contact with an attorney for the group the night before his fatal car-crash, furthering speculation that he sought protection from a potential government investigation.