WSJ: The Off-Grid Administration

The Off-Grid Administration

The many ways Obama officials have ducked public accountability


Review and Outlook
Aug. 31, 2015
The Wall Street Journal


In a famous remark two years ago during a Google Plus Hangout, President Obama boasted that “this is the most transparent administration in history.” This is belied by Administration officials, from Hillary Clinton on down, who have run their communications off the government grid.

A bipartisan consensus has long held that a healthy democracy requires a significant measure of government transparency. That is why since 1950 Washington has operated under the Federal Records Act, which requires the government to preserve documents about its decisions.

Since the 1960s the government has been subject to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), giving citizens the right to view those records. In 2009 the National Archives issued rules requiring agencies to preserve employee work on nonofficial accounts in a government record-keeping system.

Then came the Obama Administration, whose modus operandi has been to hide from this legal regime. This year the world learned that Hillary Clinton conducted most of her correspondence as Secretary of State on a private, homemade email system that she failed to disclose and kept away from the federal government.

We have since learned that at least one of her aides, Huma Abedin, also had an account on that private system. When the press exposed the system, Mrs. Clinton deemed herself the arbiter of what she would allow the American people to see. Mrs. Abedin still hasn’t bothered to deliver her government records to State. In late July another Clinton aide, Philippe Reines, gave State 20 boxes of work-related emails, taken in part from his private email account.

In August the Competitive Enterprise Institute filed a motion in court to gain access to the private email account of White House science czar John Holdren, who may have used it for government work. Some years ago CEI helped bring to light that then-EPA Chief Lisa Jackson used a secret alias, “ Richard Windsor,” when emailing on the EPA system. This seemed designed to thwart FOIA requests for her conversations, since “Lisa Jackson” appeared nowhere on her emails.

In 2013 an Associated Press report revealed the practice was rampant among Administration officials, including the Secretaries of Agriculture, Labor, and Health & Human Services. All had secret government email accounts that neither Congress nor the public knew about.

Last Monday the IRS was forced to acknowledge to a federal court that it recently discovered that Lois Lerner (of political targeting fame) used a second, private email to conduct government work. The account was set up under the name “ Toby Miles,” and the IRS still can’t account for its contents.

It has been two years since Congress first subpoenaed Ms. Lerner’s emails. In 2013 when Mrs. Lerner was still directing the IRS’s Exempt Organizations unit, she cautioned colleagues to be careful what they said on email; then she inquired whether the agency’s instant-messaging system was archived. Told it wasn’t, she responded by email: “Perfect.”

Last week a federal court subpoenaed former EPA official Phillip North after a complaint by a mining concern called the Pebble Partnership. Mr. North worked from inside the EPA with outside activists to scuttle Pebble’s proposed Alaskan mining project, and he did so on private email.

The Lerner and North cases also highlight the Administration’s sloppy, or willfully obstructionist, approach to recordkeeping. Recall the crash of Ms. Lerner’s hard drive, and the IRS’s claim for months it had no backup of her work. Treasury’s Inspector General would later find some. Mr. North’s hard drive also crashed, and Pebble claims that key North emails and documents have gone missing from EPA’s official record.

In 2012 the Gawker website filed a FOIA request for documents involving Mr. Reines, the Clinton adviser. State said in 2013 it couldn’t find any such documents. In mid-August this year, the department declared in a court filing that it had suddenly found close to 18,000 after all. Watchdog groups report similar behavior across nearly every department and agency—processing delays, missing records, and a tendency to redact information that ought to be made public.

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Government officials need some modicum of privacy to get work done. But this Administration’s evasion goes way past a reasonable standard of conduct. Why shouldn’t the public conclude that officials serving in the Obama Administration are flouting the disclosure system because they are engaged in practices they wish to hide from public knowledge and debate?

President Obama favors government by executive order. How about this one: A Presidential directive requiring every appointee and bureaucrat to attest to the existence of any private email, texting or instant-messaging systems being used for government work. All off-the-reservation documentation must cease. Private email is for personal needs.

The chances of this happening are nil. Opacity has served the Obama Administration’s political purposes if not the country. A sunnier day will have to wait until 2017.


Article Link to the Wall Street Journal:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-off-grid-administration-1441063961

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