Obama's Record of Unprecedented Secrecy

[Richard Cranium]

http://i41.tinypic.com/14mq2df.jpg

President Barack Obama, on his first full day in office in 2009, promised, “Let me say it as simply as I can: transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”


Time has given the lie to this bold statement—repeatedly.

In fact, what America has seen is unprecedented secrecy. Judicial Watch has had to file over 1,000 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and well over 100 lawsuits against the Obama administration seeking information about:

Obamacare;
the continued funding of the criminal ACORN network;
tracking Wall Street bailout money;
the czar racket;
immigration policy;
election integrity;
information on Operation Fast and Furious (which led to the death of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry and countless Mexican citizens);
records concerning the illegal appointment of Richard Cordray to the NSA-esque, personal financial data-drilling Consumer Finance Protection Board;
the images of the capture, killing, and burial of Osama bin Laden (that might upset the terrorists);
disastrous green energy loan guarantees;
Benghazi;
Billions of dollars of spending on Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac (the government takeover of the mortgage market);
Hillary Clinton’s ethics compliance records (from an administration that has probably perfected the “ethics waiver,” but that’s another story).

This president touts transparency but condones law-breaking of open records laws by his administration. The Obama administration has perfected the art of “selective transparency.” It releases documents when it serves them and keeps them secret when it does not. For instance, the Obama White House makes a show of posting some of the Secret Service’s White House visitor log entries, while withholding hundreds of thousands of others and opposing the logs’ full release under law in court. We have even had to sue for basic information on the taxpayer costs of the Obamas’ many luxury vacations.

We battled the Bush administration all the way up to the Supreme Court on secrecy issues. But I can tell you that Obama makes George W. Bush seem like a piker on government secrecy. Leftists will, in rare honest moments, tell you too: the Obama administration is less transparent than the Bush administration.

Time is a friend to the politician with scandals and embarrassments to hide, in the hopes that the news cycle will move on or that the public will forget. Getting beyond the Obama administration’s smokescreen is about a simple principle: the public’s right to know the full truth about what its government is up to.

There are many “big lies” that live within the Obama administration. But few are promoted more directly by this president than the one about his administration’s supposed transparency.

[Richard Cranium]

Courts Allow Obama to Keep White House Visitor Logs Secret

When Barack Obama came to office he promised that he would have the most ethical, most transparent presidency in American history. This month the Obama administration won a court judgment to allow Obama to keep the White House visitor log a secret from the American people.

On August 30, a federal appeals court decided that the White House visitor logs are not "public information" and therefore not subject to the disclosure requirements required by the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

The vote was not close, either. It was a 3-0 decision allowing Obama to keep visitor log sheets secret for up to 12 years after he has left office--as is the case with many presidential records.

Merrick Garland, Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, a native Chicagoan and 1997 Bill Clinton appointee who became chief judge on Obama's watch, insisted that he took his cue from Congress itself.

In his decision, Garland said that with FOIA, "Congress made clear that it did not want documents like the appointment calendars of the president and his close advisors to be subject to disclosure."

This is a blow to the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch that has been pursuing the release of the visitor logs.

Upon release of the decision, Judicial Watch President, Tom Fitton, said, "Decisions like this turn the Freedom of Information Act from a transparency law to a secrecy law."

Garland maintained that opening the logs to immediate public scrutiny would represent a "serious intrusion" into the president's daily operations.

Garland's opinion on the logs coincides with that of the George W. Bush administration, as well.

In 2008 when Obama first came to office, administration flack John Podesta said that Obama would implement the "strictest ethics rules ever applied" to the White House.

But almost immediately upon taking office Obama began to break his own rules. Only weeks passed, for instance, before he broke his "rules" on hiring lobbyists, a proscription against which was one of his most insistent campaign claims.