Obama administration's unconscionably low standard of transparency

"When it comes to our record on transparency, we've got a lot to be proud of. And, frankly, it sets the standard that future administrations will have to live up to."

So said White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest, during a so-called "press gaggle" — as the White House terms it — Wednesday aboard Air Force One.

Earnest's remarks came two days after the White House announced new rules formally exempting its Office of Administration from compliance with the Freedom of Information Act.

The perverse irony is that the announcement occurred during Sunshine Week, an annual observance by the American Society of Newspaper Editors to remind the reading public of the role of the press in advancing government transparency.

Meanwhile, the Associated Press this week published an analysis of the Obama administration's handling of FOIA requests. "The Obama administration set a record again" last year, the wire service reported, "for censoring government documents or denying access to them."

The administration said more often that it couldn't find requested documents. With those it found, it took the administration longer to turn them over, especially those that might be especially newsworthy.

The administration eliminated nearly 375 full-time government employees paid to look for documents and files — the fewest number working on FOIA requests in five years.

That explains why there were more than 200,000 unanswered FOIA requests last year, a 55 percent increase over 2013, according to the AP. Such a woeful record belies the laughable claim President Obama made two years ago that his administration was "the most transparent in history."

Indeed, the journalists who cover Obama think his administration one of the least-transparent in recent memory.

That was borne out by a survey last year of the White House press corps by Politico Magazine. By a more than 2-1 margin, the journos agreed that the Obama White House was "the most secretive" they'd ever covered.

Moreover, by 8-1, they considered the George W. Bush White House "more forthcoming" than Obama's. And, considering how much the White House press corps loathed W., that's saying something.

And what it is saying is that there is a culture of secrecy within the Obama administration.

It's not secrecy for the sake of national security (which might be defensible). It's secrecy for purposes of evasion that have nothing whatsoever to do with national security, and everything to do with misleading Congress and downright deceiving the American people.

That's why Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber made sure the law was written to hide the fact that healthy people would pay higher taxes to subsidize sick people. "Lack of transparency (was) a huge political advantage," he acknowledged last October.

Lisa Jackson, former head of Obama's Environmental Protection Agency, created a secret email account in the name of a fictitious EPA employee. She went to such lengths to hide the fact that she was working in cahoots with environmental activists to advance their regulatory agenda.

Then there is Herself, former secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton. So paranoid was she that incriminating emails might one day be made public because of a congressional subpoena or public FOIA request, that she eschewed a State Department email account in favor of a personal account — Clintonmail.com — on a private server at her home.

President Obama knew his secretary of state was communicating offline because he exchanged emails with her. Yet, when the story broke in the New York Times, he feigned ignorance.

Such obfuscation by the Obama administration — up to and including the president himself — is nothing to be proud of. It's an unconscionably low standard of transparency that, hopefully, the next administration does not live down to.

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JWR contributor Joseph Perkins is a staff columnist at the Orange County Register. His column has appeared in JWR since 1997.