Tim Carney writes for the Washington Examiner‘s “Beltway Confidential” about President Obama’s record of secrecy.
Candidate Obama promised transparency. President Obama talks as if he has delivered it. People paying close attention know he hasn’t. Mike Riggs at Reason magazine lays out Obama’s pattern of secrecy, especially with regard to national security.
The meat of Riggs’ article:
While the Obama administration invested big money in redesigning old government websites and launching flashy new ones such as recovery.gov and federalregister.gov, it continued to behave like its predecessor on transparency issues of consequence. In the first year of Obama’s presidency, the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury were sued by Bloomberg News, Fox News, and The New York Times for withholding documents related to the Wall Street bailout. The CIA and the National Security Agency were sued by the Electronic Freedom Foundation for refusing to release documents detailing internal lawbreaking. Agencies across the executive branch recorded 466,872 FOIA denials, an increase of 66 percent over Bush’s last year in office. …
[O]ther decisions from early in Obama’s presidency show the ways in which this administration has actively worked to preserve Bush-era secrecy.
The case Riggs make is pretty strong. I’ve been making this case since Obama spiked his Transparency Czar position in 2010 and handed that portfolio over to a partisan lawyer with a long history of open antagonism towards transparency.
