President Barack Obama ran for office touting openness and
transparency. That was then, this is now.
Reports Michael Isikoff for Newsweek:
As a senator, Barack Obama denounced the Bush administration
for holding "secret energy meetings" with oil executives at the
White House. But last week public-interest groups were dismayed
when his own administration rejected a Freedom of Information
Act request for Secret Service logs showing the identities of
coal executives who had visited the White House to discuss
Obama's "clean coal" policies. One reason: the disclosure of
such records might impinge on privileged "presidential
communications." The refusal, approved by White House counsel
Greg Craig's office, is the latest in a series of cases in
which Obama officials have opted against public disclosure.
Since Obama pledged on his first day in office to usher in a
"new era" of openness, "nothing has changed," says David
-Sobel, a lawyer who litigates FOIA cases. "For a president who
said he was going to bring unprecedented transparency to
government, you would certainly expect more than the recycling
of old Bush secrecy policies."
The hard line appears to be no accident. After Obama's
much-publicized Jan. 21 "transparency" memo, administration
lawyers crafted a key directive implementing the new policy
that contained a major loophole, according to FOIA experts. The
directive, signed by Attorney General Eric Holder, instructed
federal agencies to adopt a "presumption" of disclosure for
FOIA requests. This reversal of Bush policy was intended to
restore a standard set by President Clinton's attorney general,
Janet Reno. But in a little-noticed passage, the Holder memo
also said the new standard applies "if practicable" for cases
involving "pending litigation." Dan Metcalfe, the former
longtime chief of FOIA policy at Justice, says the passage and
other "lawyerly hedges" means the Holder memo is now
"astonishingly weaker" than the Reno policy. (The visitor-log
request falls in this category because of a pending Bush-era
lawsuit for such records.)
From detention of suspected terrorists to public disclosure, this
administration's slogan appears to have become:
"Never mind." What's the next promise likely to be
discarded?
About the Author
Doug Bandow is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute and the Senior Fellow in International Religious Persecution at the Institute on Religion and Public Policy. A former Special Assistant to President Ronald Reagan, he is author of Beyond Good Intentions: A Biblical View of Politics (Crossway).
