Remember THIS from February 2, 2009?
"President Barack Obama boldly proclaimed recently that "Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency." And then, adding substance to the rhetoric, the president took two important steps in the right direction.
He repealed a 2001 executive order granting former presidents and vice presidents the ability to keep documents secret beyond the 12 years allowed by law, and rescinded a Bush administration directive encouraging agencies to withhold records under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
These moves earned widespread praise from government watchdog organizations, including Judicial Watch. But does the president's professed commitment to transparency signal the end of the "era of government secrecy?"Not so fast.
Do you remember at the outset of the first Clinton administration when Bill Clinton boldly proclaimed that he would operate "the most ethical administration in the history of the Republic?" With respect to FOIA, the guidance issued by Clinton Attorney General Janet Reno was for a "presumption of disclosure." In practice, it too often turned out to be the opposite.
You may recall that Judicial Watch filed multiple FOIA lawsuits against the Clinton administration involving the illegal scheme to "sell" taxpayer-financed trade missions in exchange for contributions to the Clinton-Gore 1996 re-election campaign.
During litigation, Nolanda Hill, a personal confidant and business partner of the late Commerce Secretary Ron Brown, declared in a sworn statement that the Clinton White House (specifically, Obama's CIA nominee Leon Panetta) ordered Brown to withhold documents until after the 1996 elections and to devise a way not to comply with court orders.
That was government secrecy at its worst.
And then the Bush administration was terribly hostile to the people's right to know and did its best to keep secret basic information about government operations. The good news is, under pressure from a bipartisan majority in Congress, Bush signed a law making it easier to obtain records under the FOIA. And it went into full effect this year for the Obama administration.
Obama has gotten off to a good start on transparency. We hope this means he'll finally release the records of any Blagojevich contact about his Senate seat. And maybe we'll finally get the straight story about what happened to his records from his days in the Illinois state legislature.
Obama needs to come clean and become transparent about his own past. Otherwise, his pronouncements on "openness" will be nothing more than words.
Written by Tom Fitton, President of Judicial Watch. Originally published in the DC Examiner on February 2, 2009.
NOW we are seeing THIS - -
Clinton Withholds Sotomayor Files
Although Barack Obama chastised Bill Clinton during the presidential primary for withholding crucial files from Hillary's disastrous healthcare task force, he supports the former commander-in-chief's decision to withhold hundreds of documents relating to Sonia Sotomayor's 1990s appeals court confirmation battle.
Responding to a Freedom of Information Act request from various media outlets, the Clinton Presidential Library recently posted thousands of documents relating to the 1997 nomination of Judge Sotomayor to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, but crucial files were purposely excluded.
The omitted documents are said to include revealing memos between Clinton White House officials about Sotomayor as well as early drafts and answers to questions posed by the Senate Judiciary Committee, according to one of the newspapers that requested the information. There were also files related to Sotomayor's health, finances and FBI background check.
The excluded information certainly seems more relevant and important than the mundane stuff that was promptly made public. Those documents mainly feature previously publicized information such as Sotomayor's judicial opinions as a district court judge, press releases, past speeches and reports as well as a plethora of letters sent to the White House by supporters. Basically, lot's of puff.
Clinton gets to keep the juicy stuff private by invoking a measure that allows a president to essentially hide from the public information about his administration for the first 12 years after leaving office. The former president could however, issue a waiver or direct a representative to allow the archives to release the material sooner.
When Hillary was still going strong in the last presidential primary, Obama called on Bill to issue such a waiver relating to the cabinet-level National Taskforce on Health Care Reform chaired by the former First Lady. Judicial Watch filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit to obtain the documents, which are archived at the Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock, Arkansas.
Bill opted to keep the files from the public however, and Camp Obama went to town speculating what the famous First Couple could be hiding. So far, Obama has made no such accusation regarding his Supreme Court nominee while Americans undoubtedly wonder.
