The Obama administration set some new records last year resisting Freedom of Information requests, setting a low bar for President Trump to have a more transparent administration than his predecessor.
The former administration set records for the amount it spent resisting such requests in court; the number of times it denied the existence of the documents being requested; the number of times it refused access to requested documents; and for conditioning the release on payment by the person requesting.
Of the $36.2 million in legal costs fighting such lawsuits last year, the Justice Department accounted for $12 million, the Homeland Security Department for $6.3 million and the Pentagon for $4.8 million. The three departments accounted for more than half the government’s total records requests last year.
Of course, the numbers are worth looking at, but they don’t tell the whole story. The Obama administration was also known to place political appointees where they could interfere with FOIA requests and use the requests to monitor what journalists were working on. Emails obtained from the IRS also suggest that employees there, including Lois Lerner, deliberately used an internal messaging system so that records of their conversations would not be kept for FOIA or for Congress to see later.
And of course, we needn’t mention that certain Cabinet members completely circumvented FOIA, frustrating lawful requests, by concealing their work emails on personal email servers. Even then, that’s really only the tip of the iceberg.
So much for the promise of “the most transparent administration in history.”
