Darrell Issa's Freedom of Information Act
In his new role as grand inquisitor of the Obama administration, Congressman Darrell Issa (R-CA) is performing his own freedom of information act. That is, after eight years during which President Bush as a matter of policy by default rejected Freedom Information of Act (FOIA) requests, Issa now wants the names of every person making them.
As the New York Times reported last week, that massive invasion of citizens' privacy is just the latest effort by Issa's Government Oversight committee to embarrass President Obama.
Mr. Issa, a California Republican and the new chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, says he wants to make sure agencies respond in a timely fashion to Freedom of Information Act requests and do not delay them out of political considerations...
Mr. Issa sent a letter on Tuesday asking 180 federal agencies, from the Department of Defense to the Social Security Administration, for electronic files containing the names of people who requested the documents, the date of their requests and a description of information they sought. For those still pending after more than 45 days, he also asked for any communication between the requestor and the federal agency. The request covers the final three years of Bush administration and the first two years of President Obama's.
And today, Issa sent a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano complaining that DHS personnel were subjecting FOIA requests to political review:
Issa initially interviewed Chief Privacy Officer of the Department of Homeland Security Mary Ellen Callahan in September, regarding a slew of emails obtained by the Associated Press that, according to the AP report, indicated the DHS was turning sensitive Freedom of Information Act requests over to top political advisers for "highly unusual scrutiny."
"[Callahan] assured the staff that political appointees were not inappropriately interfering with the FOIA process," Issa wrote in his letter to Napolitano. "In reliance on these statements, I asked my staff to put our inquiry on hold temporarily."
Issa said he recently obtained information that contradicted that assurance, however, and has pledged to continue the investigation.
Of course, when a Republican sat on the Oval Office, Darrell Issa and his GOP colleagues were silent as President Bush made freedom of information the exception to the rule.
Even before the September 11 attacks, the Bush White House planned to significantly curtail FOIA access. In October 2001, Attorney General John Ashcroft issued a memo which reversed 35 years of White House practice by making disclosure the exception to the rule. As the New York Times recalled in 2002:
Mr. Ashcroft said the Bush administration's standard would be to support withholding documents as long as there was a "sound legal basis" for doing so. The previous standard, issued in 1993 by Janet Reno, the attorney general under President Bill Clinton, was to support withholding documents only if "disclosure would be harmful."
Ashcroft's new standard declared that "any discretionary decision by your agency to disclose information protected under the FOIA should be made only after full and deliberate consideration of the institutional, commercial, and personal privacy interests that could be implicated by disclosure of the information." And as it turned out, from its clampdown on the Freedom of Information Act and withholding Reagan-Bush 41 records to the clandestine Cheney energy task force and a dramatic increase in top secret classifications, the Bush administration made sure that the sun would not shine on its inner workings.
And that, as it turns out, was just fine with Darrell Issa.
As you'll recall, millions of Bush White House emails conveniently went missing between 2003 and 2005, including those in the critical days during which the administration formulated its response to Ambassador Joe Wilson and his covert CIA operative wife, Valerie Plame. In July 2007, Darrell Issa accused Plame of perjury. Then, in February 2008, Issa turned IT expert and brushed off the email imbroglio as merely a software problem:
During a House Oversight Committee hearing last month on the preservation of White House records, an indignant Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), a frequent critic of Chairman Henry Waxman's investigations, did his best to play down the extent of the Bush administration's now well-documented email archiving problems. Defending the White House's decision to switch from the Lotus Notes-based archiving system used by the Clinton administration, Issa compared the software to "using wooden wagon wheels" and Sony Betamax tapes. To observers of the missing emails controversy, Issa's comments seemed little more than an attempt to deflect blame from the White House for replacing a working system for archiving presidential records with an ad hoc substitute. But to IT professionals who use Lotus at their companies, Issa's remarks seemed controversial, if not downright slanderous. Now, according to an executive at IBM, the software's manufacturer, the California congressman has apologized for his characterization of Lotus and offered to correct the congressional record.
(Thanks to the now-settled lawsuit filed by the National Security Archive and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington [CREW], Americans learned in 2009 that "the Bush White House, which initially denied that any e-mails had gone missing, announced in January it had located more than 22 million messages that had been mislabeled after a search by computer technicians, according to court records filed by the government on the day after Bush left office.")
For its part, the Obama administration immediately ordered an end to Ashcroft's policy of stonewalling Freedom of Information Act requests. No doubt, there have been some hiccups in carrying out Attorney General Eric Holder's pledge to restore "the presumption of disclosure that is at the heart of the Freedom of Information Act."
Of course, when the information in question was being withheld by Republican George W. Bush, Darrell Issa was predictably quiet. But now that a Democrat is in the White House, Issa wants all to know what's happening with every Freedom of Information Act request.
Including yours.
Needless to say, the potential for political payback is almost unlimited. David Cuillier, a University of Arizona journalism professor and chairman of the Freedom of Information Committee at the Society of Professional Journalists, called it "sort of creepy that one person in the government could track who is looking into what and what kinds of questions they are asking," adding, "It is an easy way to target people who he might think are up to no good."
(For more background on the hyperpartisan Issa, see "The Top 15 Moments from the Darrell Issa Hall of Shame.")
Astonishing how Issa can do investigate the DHS over FOIA and at the same time wants the government to compile a list of everyone who makes a FOIA request.
It would be mind-blowing if my mind weren't already blown by Republican antics years ago.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/29/us/politics/29issa.html