Hot on the high heels of the Clinton email atrocity, where one individual determined for her own campaign and indeed for all of history which parts of her work as a taxpayer-paid government official would be forever sent down the Memory Hole, the White House announced it is deleting a federal regulation that subjects its Office of Administration to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), making official an unofficial policy under Presidents Bush and Obama to simply reject requests for records to that office.
And in case you proles still have not got it, the White House announcement comes in the middle of “Sunshine Week,” an annual nationwide celebration of access to public information.
And in case you proles really still have not gotten the message, the White House made the announcement on March 17, National Freedom of Information Day.
And in case you proles really, really still have not gotten the message, the Office of Administration handles, among other things, White House record-keeping duties like the archiving of emails and White House visitor logs. The impact of this action is thus significant — the public will have no means to seek disclosure of what is written inside the White House among public servants nor information on who visits the White House.
The White House said the “cleanup” of FOIA regulations is consistent with court rulings which hold that the office is not subject to the transparency laws such as FOIA. The government’s senior adviser for Open Government defended the policy by citing multiple instances of transparency.
The defense is more Newspeak. The problem with those “multiple instances” is that they were all voluntary, the release of information the government wished to release. The key to the Freedom of Information Act was that it could once compel the government to release information it did not otherwise want to release. That now, in Post Constitutional America, is gone.
Get it now?
Reprinted with permission from WeMeantWell.com.
