“This is the most transparent administration in [US] history.”
— President Obama, February 14, 2013
As a new presidency looms large above the American political sphere, with rumored announcements of prospective candidates and a more vocal exchange between partisan camps than ever, one has to wonder how much more the current administration can do to fully sway the pendulous political zeitgeist completely away from the Democratic ticket come 2016. If drone strikes, war crimes, and spying on/assassinating US citizens weren’t enough, this next brilliant course of action just might be: it has been reported recently that Obama’s White House essentially said that the Freedom of Information Act no longer applies to them.
As USA Today reports:
“The White House said the cleanup of FOIA regulations is consistent with court rulings that hold that the office is not subject to the transparency law. The office handles, among other things, White House record-keeping duties like the archiving of e-mails.
But the timing of the move raised eyebrows among transparency advocates, coming on National Freedom of Information Day and during a national debate over the preservation of Obama administration records. It’s also Sunshine Week, an effort by news organizations and watchdog groups to highlight issues of government transparency.
“The irony of this being Sunshine Week is not lost on me,” said Anne Weismann of the liberal Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW.
“It is completely out of step with the president’s supposed commitment to transparency,” she said. “That is a critical office, especially if you want to know, for example, how the White House is dealing with e-mail.”
The Freedom of Information Act, as it currently reads, “provides a right of access to the public of government records. The Act also allows the government to withhold certain information in responding to those requests in 9 exemptions, including for national security, deliberative process and attorney client, and confidential business information, to name a few.” (5 U.S.C. § 552)
But according to USA Today, those exceptions already didn’t exist until the previous amendment applied in 1996, and the regulations that remained still subjected the Office of Administration to the act, meaning it had to comply if prompted to disclose its actions as part of public record. Now, with this newest move the Obama administration has basically exempted the records of itself and the previous administration to this law, meaning they don’t have to reveal anything if they don’t wish to.
It gets better – even with this new outing of prior regulations, the White House is still technically violating the law in one-third of the instances it refuses to comply. So, how does it get away with it in those instances? Well, it’s really rather clever – the Obama administration isn’t technically failing to physically hand over documentation if asked in those particular instances; instead, it is sometimes merely handing over said information with significant amendments and omissions in tow. One report confirms that the White House is doing either one or the other “at an unprecedented rate.” In one case, it was reported that every single word on every single page of a report sent to the ACLU had been redacted, setting a new record for how much information could be classified at a time – all of it. If Washington put the same amount of diligence and passion into actually abiding by the Constitution as they clearly put into mass obfuscation, perhaps the “hope” slogan might have actually come true.
As it stands now, however, I find it very difficult to believe a freshly betrayed public warming up to the idea of another Democrat in the White House for at least the first four years of the next administration.
