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A question about law for class. Law people HELP!?

I am working on a media law problem and here is my question. A woman is trying to sue for libel and she wants documents from the Federal Aviation Administration, the National Transportation Safety Board, and the Congressional Budget Office to help in her law suit. She is trying to prove that air traffic controllers were at fault for a plane crash. Can she obtain documents from these agencies? Can she obtain any or all through the FOIA?

Public Comments

1. She can put in a FOIA request to obtain the documents, but chances are requests would be denied or the documents would be severely redacted. Any type of information that could be deemed "trade secrets" of the governmental agency in question or could fall under the umbrella of "national security" is not releasable. Ditto that for personal information. Read up on FOIA (Title 5, United States Code, section 522(a)) and you'll find there's a list of items that do not have to be released.
2. She can obtain under FOIA since it is a libel case. She is entitled to obtain any and all documents that support her case. However, any information that is held in privacy would not be included, since foundation for a cause of libel is that the damaging information was first published.
3. It depends. She can try and request them through the discovery process but she can't speculate what was in those documents and then plead them in the complaint. She has to have other evidence that would support the fact that those documents have what she is looking for. Otherwise it will look like a fishing expedition and the court will deny her discovery request assuming the agancies object to handing the docs over.
4. "A party intending to offer a record into evidence under this paragraph must provide written notice of that intention to all adverse parties, and must make the record and declaration available for inspection sufficiently in advance of their offer into evidence to provide an adverse party with a fair opportunity to challenge them." Article X of the Federal Rules of Evidence would be where I started looking for answers.