Obama, Holder Hailed for Openness at Transparency Celebration
Hillary Clinton email jokes were absent from the Sunshine Week event at the Justice Department.
By Steven Nelson
March 16, 2015 | 2:48 p.m. EDT
The Department of Justice hosted a 40-minute Sunshine Week transparency celebration Monday, in which the nation's leaders were credited with expanding access to government records.
President Barack Obama’s claim to run “the most transparent administration in history” is widely ridiculed and viewed with suspicion, most recently so with revelations that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton used a personal email account while in office and deleted thousands of emails.
But in the Great Hall of the Department of Justice’s Washington headquarters, Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder won repeated praise as agents of transparency. Speakers politely avoided mention of their unprecedented crackdown on unauthorized disclosures to the press.
“The president compared transparency to sunlight, laying the groundwork for what we celebrate today,” Melanie Pustay, director of the Justice Department’s Office of Information Policy, told the crowd. Many members of the audience were there to accept awards.
“We’re carrying out the president’s vision of an open government,” Acting Associate Attorney General Stuart Delery said with approval.
On his first full day in office, Obama ordered that government employees implementing the Freedom of Information Act err on the side of disclosure and instructed the Department of Justice to draft new FOIA-related guidelines, which stressed proactive disclosures.
[ALSO: Holder Hit With FOIAs Even Before Withholding Fast and Furious Docs]
Still, agencies have struggled with large backlogs, slowing the public's access to records sought under the 1966 law.
Exiled whistleblower Edward Snowden’s disclosures of secret mass surveillance practices also inspired FOIA requests that revealed very little due to denials and redactions. And Syracuse University researchers found the number of FOIA lawsuits filed against the federal government in fiscal year 2014 – 422 – was higher than in any year since 2001.
The Obama administration previously fought court battles against the compelled disclosure of White House visitor logs and its legal justification for assassinating a U.S. citizen abroad.
[READ: NSA: Releasing Snowden Emails Would Violate His Privacy]
Though Department of Justice officials praised their bosses on Monday, lower-level government employees who process Freedom of Information Act requests were the focus of the event.
Workers from the National Archives, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Federal Highway Administration and the U.S. Department of Agriculture were given awards. Pustay praised efforts to modernize FOIA tasks (some agencies still force people to submit paper requests), as well as proactive-disclosure practices by FOIA officers, good customer service and efficiency.
Delery said the workers must do “careful work” to achieve transparency “without compromising interests” such as national security or ongoing criminal investigations.
The State Department, which Clinton led from 2009 to 2013, was not recognized with an award. The Associated Press is suing the department – which is among the least transparent government agencies, according to a FOIA-focused report from the Center for Effective Government – for Clinton's emails after previous Freedom of Information Act requests were not fulfilled.
http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2015/03/16/federal-transparency-celebration-hails-obama-holder-for-openness?int=9b9e08&int=9b5908
