On Tuesday, the Washington Examiner’s Sarah Westwood reported that Peggy Grafeld, a Freedom of Information officer at the State Department, asked colleagues to “discuss, rather than email” information about Hillary Clinton’s records as secretary of state.
This information came to light as part of freedom of information litigation by the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch.
As the group put it, the message “shows that one of the agency’s top officials for the records management and public disclosure did not want to create a written record about issues.” The deeper problem is that this is not an isolated incident.
One could fairly blame the culture of opacity that Clinton helped foster within the department she ran from 2009 to 2013. Her decision to withhold her official correspondence from the department and the taxpayers for nearly six years provides sufficient evidence that, far from being a leader on the issue of government transparency, she was working against good government principles from her perch atop the State Department.
The fact that there are five months’ worth of gaps in the email record Clinton finally turned over to the department poses an additional problem for her beleaguered president campaign.
But unfortunately, Clinton was not the only bad apple in government. Federal officials seem to believe they are entitled to privacy as they conduct the work of the public. President Obama called for increased transparency as one of his first acts in office. No one important seems to have gotten the memo.
His first climate czar, former Clinton EPA director Carol Browner, is most famous now for her admonition to “put nothing in writing” during talks with the auto industry in 2009. Multiple Obama administration employees — including former EPA director Lisa Jackson — have been caught using secret email addresses in order to evade FOIA requests by private citizens.
Marilyn Tavenner, the former HHS official charged with the disastrous launch of HealthCare.gov, was caught deleting official emails, purportedly to save storage space.
It is widely known the IRS pretended to have lost a large volume of email correspondence by Lois Lerner, the senior IRS manager who led a campaign of harassment against conservative non-profit applicants. It is less well-known that Lerner and other IRS employees deliberately used an instant message system that would not leave a trace of their conversations. More recently, it has emerged that she conducted some official business using a private email address attached to a fake name.
Good government depends upon the citizenry having information about what government is doing. Sadly, the bureaucracy seems to be working overtime to thwart the purpose of the Freedom of Information Act, in the belief that they can return to the old days when the workings of government were opaque and bureaucrats could do as they pleased.
It hardly helps when top-level officials like Clinton go to such great lengths to conceal their activities from the public. But when FOIA officers themselves are working to cover their tracks in the course of helping top officials like Clinton cover theirs, it’s a sign that Congress needs to toughen freedom of information laws.
