Obama declares end to government secrecy

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He repealed a 2001 executive order granting former presidents and vice presidents the ability to keep documents secret beyond the 12 years allowed by law, and rescinded a Bush administration directive encouraging agencies to withhold records under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).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.

Tom Fitton is president of Judicial Watch, a nonpartisan educational foundation that fights government corruption.