A White House spokesman said Monday that the Obama administration has a better record of granting Freedom of Information Act requests than any of its predecessors, and that as Congress considers rewriting the rules that opened the inner-workings of the executive branch to the public, lawmakers should subject their dealings to the same scrutiny.
“Congress is the one writing the rules and, right now, they’re writing the rules in such a way that they don’t have to play by them,” said White House spokesman Josh Earnest.
“[T]he basis of this legislation is that the American people have a right to know more about what’s happening inside their government,” he added, referring to pending House legislation aimed at improving the Executive Branch’s system for responding to requests for information. “I don’t understand why Congress doesn’t think the American people don’t have a right to understand exactly what’s happening in the Congress.”
Earnest said as part of President Obama’s pledge to oversee the most transparent White House in history, the administration processed 647,142 FOIA requests in 2014. “More than 91 percent” of those “resulted in the person making the request receiving some or all of the requested information,” Earnest added.
Earnest also plugged the website the Obama administration started, data.gov, for sharing information with Americans. It contains “more than 180,000 datasets” in an easy to “slice and dice” format.
Earnest took a shot at the preceding administration of President George W. Bush, which “went to the Supreme Court to try to prevent the release” visitor logs, which is something “that we release on a voluntary basis on a regular schedule.”
Despite the email controversy surrounding Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state, the State Department’s release of tens of thousands of pages of her official and private emails per FOIA requests shows the administration’s dedication to openness, Earnest said.
“[W]hen it comes to the State Department, yes, there have been some disputes about this, but, again, I would encourage you to take a look at the results, which is that you have the former secretary of State releasing all of her work-related e-mails, consistent with the FOIA process,” he said.
The FOIA discussion came the same day the White House announced it would start using the internet application Snapchat.
Users originally flocked to Snapchat because of the fleeting nature of the content, as messages automatically erase within seconds. But more and more politicians are joining in hopes of engaging more and younger voters.
In a joke that boomeranged on her, Hillary Clinton last summer tried to make light of her own email controversy by saying how much she enjoyed Snapchat’s premise.
“You may have seen that I recently launched a Snapchat account,” Clinton said during an August fundraiser in Iowa. “I love it. I love it. Those messages disappear all by themselves.”
But Earnest said the White House struck a deal with Snapchat’s creators to ensure that Obama’s messages will be part of his official archives.
“I’m confident that we will ensure that even though the Snapchat messages disappear, that they are properly recorded for posterity’s sake,” Earnest said. “We have been able to work this out with them.”
