35+ YEARS OF FREEDOM OF INFORMATION ACTION
Update
Washington, D.C. October 27, 2020 – Nearly 60 million Americans have already cast their ballots in the upcoming presidential election. While transparency and accurate information are critical as voters go to the polls, secrecy surrounding the government's handling of the novel coronavirus pandemic and disinformation campaigns are muddying the waters, not providing clarity. An update to the National Security Archive's March 2020 audit shows that, from silencing the special pandemic inspector general to deploying unidentified federal officers against civil rights protesters, the Trump administration is doubling down on secrecy in the lead-up to the election.
These transparency backslides aren't written in stone. A future Trump or Biden administration would each have the opportunity to re-institute transparency across the government from Day One. Immediate steps like resuming publishing the White House visitor logs and declassifying the entirety of the Mueller report, coupled with long-term commitments to working with Congress and addressing rampant overclassification and incentivizing proactive declassification, would go a long way to promoting transparency from the nation's highest office.
Original posting
How Transparent is President Trump? Audit Shows Three-Quarters of His Decisions Have Been Bad for Openness
Archive's Sunshine Week Audit Highlights Trump's Good, Bad, and Downright Perplexing Disclosure Decisions
Washington, D.C. March 12, 2020 – President Trump has made three times as many pro-secrecy decisions as pro-transparency ones since taking office — this according to a National Security Archive Audit released today to mark the beginning of Sunshine Week. While the record is not entirely one-sided, the survey found that the President's anti-transparency decisions - including classifying coronavirus talks, hiding the White House visitor logs, and keeping his tax returns secret - significantly outnumber the good transparency decisions he's made, including following through with the Argentina declassification project and working for more transparent hospital and prescription drug prices.
The Archive audit team scoured White House press releases, news reports, and court cases to create an interactive chronology of Trump's good, bad, and occasionally perplexing transparency decisions since taking office. The results undercut the President's repeated claim that he is the most transparent president in history, but do provide some insights into areas where the President and his team have consistently promoted transparency.
This is the Archive's 19th FOIA Audit. Modeled after the California Sunshine Survey and subsequent state "FOI Audits," the Archive's FOIA Audits use open-government laws to test whether or not agencies are obeying those same laws. Recommendations from previous Archive FOIA Audits have led directly to laws and executive orders which have: set explicit customer service guidelines, mandated FOIA backlog reduction, assigned individualized FOIA tracking numbers, forced agencies to report the average number of days needed to process requests, and revealed the (often embarrassing) ages of the oldest pending FOIA requests. The surveys include:
- Agencies Struggling to Respond to FOIA Requests for Email
- The Ashcroft Memo: "Drastic" Change or "More Thunder Than Lightning"? (2003)
- Justice Delayed is Justice Denied: The Ten Oldest Pending FOIA Requests (2003)
- A FOIA Request Celebrates Its 17th Birthday: A Report on Federal Agency FOIA Backlog (2006)
- Pseudo-Secrets: A Freedom of Information Audit of the U.S. Government's Policies on Sensitive Unclassified Information (2006)
- File Not Found: 10 Years After E-FOIA, Most Federal Agencies are Delinquent (2007)
- 40 Years of FOIA, 20 Years of Delay (2007)
- Mixed Signals, Mixed Results: How President Bush's Executive Order on FOIA Failed to Deliver (2008)
- 2010 Knight Open Government Survey: Sunshine and Shadows: The Clear Obama Message for Freedom of Information Meets Mixed Results (2010)
- 2011 Knight Open Government Survey: Glass Half Full: Freedom of Information Change, But Many Federal Agencies Lag in Fulfilling President Obama's Day One Openness Pledge (2011)
- 2011 Knight Open Government Survey: Eight Federal Agencies Have FOIA Requests a Decade Old (2011)
- Outdated Agency Regs Undermine Freedom of Information (2012)
- Freedom of Information Regulations: Still Outdated, Still Undermining Openness (2013)
- Half of Federal Agencies Still Use Outdated Freedom of Information Regulations (2014)
- Most Agencies Falling Short on Mandate for Online Records (2015)
- Saving Government Email an Open Question with December 2016 Deadline Looming (2016)
- Three out of Five Federal Agencies Flout New FOIA Law
- 25-Year-Old FOIA Request Confirms FOIA Delays Continue Unabated
Timeline
2017
January
Communications Shutdown
Several prominent agencies – including the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Interior – were reportedly ordered to scale back communications with the public, including restricted social media use and prohibiting employees from communicating with the press.Source: Sunlight Foundation
Inspectors General Targeted
The Trump transition team informs Inspectors General “that they are being held over on a temporary basis” and should seek other employment. IGs traditionally enjoy open-ended appointments regardless of party.
Source: Washington Post
RNC Emails Not Preserved
Administration officials including Kellyanne Conway, Jared Kushner, Sean Spicer and Steve Bannon reportedly used Republican National Committee email handles for government purposes – which is prohibited – and failed to forward them to government accounts for preservation.
Source: Newsweek
No Trump Tax Returns
President Trump continues to withhold his tax returns.
Source: NPR
WH Visitor Logs at Risk
On January 23 the National Security Archive filed a FOIA request to the Secret Service for the White House visitor logs. The Obama administration agreed in 2009 to post the logs 90 to 120 days after the visits took place, with several exceptions, and did so throughout the duration of Obama’s two terms; the Archive feared the Trump administration would discontinue the practice.
Source: National Security Archive
February
Front Row Seats at Mar-a-Lago
President Trump and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe sat in the dining room at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, full of club members and diners, and watched video of a North Korean ballistic missile test, prompting former House Oversight Committee Chair, Rep. Jason Chaffetz, to ask the White House about its security protocols for handling sensitive information at Mar-a-Lago.
Source: Washington Post
Trump Releases Controversial Nunes Memo
President Trump approved the release of a classified memo written by House Intelligence Committee Chair, Devin Nunes, alleging abuse of surveillance powers at the FBI and the Justice Department. The FBI opposed the release, and publicly stated it had “grave concerns” about the accuracy of the memo.
Source: USA Today
March
Some Trump Tax Info Released
The White House released President Trump’s 1040 from 2005 after being alerted that MSNBC host Rachel Maddow had obtained a leaked version and would air it on her show. The release fell short of calls for Trump to make public his most recent tax returns.
Source: The Hill
Privacy Board Left to Wither
FOIA-released emails show that the federal agency in charge of protecting Americans’ privacy and civil liberties – the Privacy and Civil Liberties and Oversight Board (PCLOB) – was down to one part-time member, and therefore unable to reach its statutory quorum and perform its oversight functions. PCLOB was not staffed at full-force by the end of the Obama administration, either.
Source: The Intercept
April
Trump Hides White House Visitor Logs
The Trump White House announced it would no longer disclose the routine visitor logs maintained by the Secret Service and published online by the Obama administration since 2009, and claimed national security and privacy risks.
The Archive and its senior analyst Kate Doyle joined with the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University and CREW, the watchdog group that first sued Presidents George W. Bush and Obama for copies of the visitor logs, in a new Freedom of Information lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security, parent agency of the Secret Service, to open the Trump logs – including at Trump Tower and Mar-a-Lago.
Source: National Security Archive
May
Trump Hotel Profits Not Tracked
NBC News reports that the Trump Organization is failing to track foreign government payments at Trump properties.
Source: NBC News
Prescription Drug Transparency
President Trump addressed prescription drug and health care costs, targeting, among other things, lack of transparency in drug pricing. His administration develops a plan to update Medicare’s drug-pricing dashboard to ensure transparency.
Source: The White House
Declassified Diplomacy with Argentina
The Trump administration continues to release U.S. government documents on human rights abuses in Argentina with a release of over 900 previously classified State Department records; it is the third tranche of records the U.S. government has released going back to a March 2016 commitment by President Barack Obama to open historical materials relating to Argentina’s earlier military dictatorship.
Source: National Security Archive
Divulging Secrets to Russian Diplomats
President Trump shared highly classified information concerning a terrorist threat with Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Ambassador to the U.S. Sergey Kislyak about a terror threat. The Post reported current and former US officials were concerned the move “jeopardized a critical source of intelligence on the Islamic State.”
Source: Washington Post
June
Trump’s Partial Financial Disclosure
President Trump submits some financial disclosure information concerning his vast business holdings to the Office of Government Ethics.
Source – The Guardian
July
Deleted Tweets and Encrypted Messaging
The National Security Archive, together with Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, sued the President for violating the law both through deleting presidential statements made on Twitter and his staffers use of secret and encrypted messaging apps that prevent the proper preservation of federal records.
Source: Newsweek
Blocked Twitter Users Sue Trump
President Trump and two aides is sued by a group of Twitter users that the President had “blocked” for criticizing him or his policies.
Source: New York Times
Trump Reveals Covert Syria Program
In a tweet, President Trump confirms the existence of a covert CIA program to arm Syrian rebels fighting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces. The admission prevents the CIA from issuing a Glomar denial in response to BuzzFeed News’ Jason Leopold’s FOIA request for information on the program.
Source: VOX
August
Election Integrity Committee Hides Info
U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly admonished President Trump’s Election Integrity Commission during a federal court hearing concerning the commission’s compliance with open government laws for not releasing all public documents before its mid-July meeting. The commission released only an agenda and proposed bylaws before the meeting, but provided commissioners with a 381-page “database” allegedly detailing 1,100 cases of voter fraud, as well as a list of possible discussion topics that should also have been published.
Judge Kollar-Kotelly said it was “incredible” that the DOJ didn’t believe it had to post “documents prepared by individual commissioners” for the meeting in advance, and ordered “the government to meet new transparency requirements” for its next meeting on September 12.
Source: Washington Post
September
Trump Family’s Personal Email Use Continues
An American Oversight FOIA request shows the President daughter and Senior Advisor continued to use personal email for government business well into the Trump administration.
Source: Engadget
Hospital Price Transparency
Trump administration finalizes a rule requiring hospitals to post a list of their standard charges online to "encourage price transparency" and improve "public accessibility."
Source: The Hill
Open Government Partnership Commitments
The Trump administration formally introduces its draft framework for the Fourth United States National Action Plan for the Open Government Partnership.
Source: The Sunlight Foundation
October
No Mar-a-Lago Visitors Records
“There is no system for keeping track of Presidential visitors at Mar-a-Lago,” according to the government’s October 4, 2017, court filing in response to a National Security Archive Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit. The suit, Doyle v. DHS, brought together with the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University and the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), seeks the Secret Service's White House visitor logs, along with Secret Service records of presidential visitors at other Trump properties.
Source: National Security Archive
Some JFK Assassination Records Stay Secret
President Trump releases some, but not all, of the remaining JFK assassination records. The Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 (JFK Act) requires that each assassination record be publicly disclosed in full by October 2017 – unless the President upholds an agency appeal and “certifies” that releasing a record would cause specific harm.
Source: Fortune
Trump Appoints New Privacy Board Member
The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, an independent agency charged with ensuring that the government’s terrorism efforts don’t infringe on privacy and civil liberties, finally got new members.
Source: MeriTalk
OSHA Press Releases Scrubbed
The Trump Administration discontinued the Occupational Safety and Health Administration's press release policy, which previously publicized serious safety and health violations.
Source: Bloomberg News
2018
January
Trump Inaugural Fund Raises Questions
President Trump’s inauguration fund raised a record-setting $106.7 million, but a year later and there is still no accounting for the surplus.
Source: USA Today
Who is Buying Trump Properties?
The Trump Organization sold $35 million in real estate in the first year of Trump’s presidency, but the vast majority of buyers are shrouded in secrecy, raising potential ethics concerns.
Source: USA Today
February
Kushner’s WH Office Hidden from FOIA
The White House is sued by Democracy Forward and Food & Water Watch for hiding the records of the Executive Office set up by the Trump administration in March 2017 to reduce the size of the federal government. The Office of American Innovation, led by Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, made news for a “fact-finding mission undertaken by the office in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria” that produced no known findings, and approved Elon Musk’s efforts to build a precursor to Musk’s proposed Hyperloop that would transport people between DC and New York in less than half an hour.
Source: Democracy Forward
Regulations Report Buried
The White House quietly released its annual draft report of the costs and benefits of government regulations showing that the economic benefit of rules passed between 2007 and 2016 totals between $287 billion and $911 billion.
Source: The Hill
WH Staff Warned About Encrypted Messages
White House lawyers reminded “President Trump’s staff not to use encrypted messaging apps for official government business as the administration seeks to dismiss a lawsuit accusing it of violating federal records laws.” The lawsuit in question was brought by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) and the Archive, and argues that White House officials reported use of encrypted and disappearing messaging acts, like Confide, violates the Presidential Records Act.
Source: Washington Post
April
Trump Delays JFK Assassination Files Release
President Trump delayed the release of the remaining JFK assassination records until October 2021. Trump justified the delay by saying that the intelligence community argued some of the information could harm “identifiable national security, law enforcement, and foreign affairs concerns.”
Source: Washington Post
May
Trump Releases Annual Financial Disclosure
President Trump released his annual financial disclosure form, which showed, among other things, he did reimburse his former lawyer Michael Cohen for a payment Cohen made to adult film star Stormy Daniels.
Source: Forbes
Trump Cancels Greenhouse Gas Research
The Trump administration shuttered NASA's Carbon Monitoring System, sharply curtailing efforts to assess greenhouse gas emissions.
Source: Science Magazine
Union Transparency
President Trump signs Executive Order 13837 (Ensuring Transparency, Accountability, and Efficiency in Taxpayer-Funded Union Time Use) to “ensure that taxpayer-funded union time is used efficiently and authorized in amounts that are reasonable, necessary, and in the public interest”.
Source: The White House
June
Trump Shreds Official Records (Literally)
News breaks that President Trump rips up his papers once he’s done with them, meaning that White House records management specialists charged with preserving federal records have to puzzle the documents together with scotch tape. Unable to disabuse the President of his habit of destroying documents, “Staffers had the fragments of paper collected from the Oval Office as well as the private residence and [sent] it over to records management across the street from the White House” for reassembling.
Source: Politico
Ignoring Congressional Requests
The Trump administration instructs agencies to ignore Congressional information requests unless those requests come from Republican lawmakers.
Source: Politico
Torture Report Returned to Congress
The Trump administration returned copies of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on the CIA’s torture program to Congress. The pernicious move, which effectively hides the report from FOIA and public scrutiny, came after years of FOIA lawsuits to win access to the historically significant document and hold accountable those responsible for torture.
Source: New York Times
IGs Still Undermined
The New York Times Editorial Board published a vigorous defense of the inspectors general of the federal government (independent officials who investigate misdeeds at their agencies) in the wake of the Trump administration’s continued undermining of these critically important positions – by either leaving the positions vacant or proposing drastic budget cuts that would cripple the offices. The Times notes, “nearly one-quarter of inspector general offices have either an acting director or no director at all, including the offices at the C.I.A., the National Security Agency, the Department of Defense and the Social Security Administration.”
Source: New York Times
No More Foreign Leader Transcripts
The White House announced it will end a long-standing practice and will no longer publish summaries of the president’s phone calls with foreign leaders.
Source: Think Progress
July
List of SCOTUS Nominees Released
President Trump releases a list of potential nominees for the Supreme Court.
Source: The White House
Trump Hides Spying Report
The Trump administration continues to withhold the Privacy and Civil Liberties and Oversight Board’s surveillance report on what the government does with personal information collected through spying, despite calls from Senators and European Union member countries to release the report.
Source: The ACLU
September
Selective Russian Election Interference Info
President Trump ordered the Justice Department to declassify information related to the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election with the purported belief this will clear a cloud that has hung over his administration since Inauguration. The statement specified that the DOJ was to “immediately declassify portions of the secret court order to monitor former campaign adviser Carter Page, along with all interviews conducted as officials applied for that authority,” as well as to release unredacted text messages of certain FBI officials.
Source: Washington Post
October
Drug Price Transparency
President Trump signs two bills - the Know the Lowest Price Act and the Patient Right to Know Drug Prices Act - to bring more transparency to drug prices.
Source: CNN
November
Trump WON’T Sit for Mueller
Trump tells Fox News that he won’t sit for an interview with special counsel Robert Mueller.
Source: New York Times
Climate Report Released (Very Quietly)
The Trump administration quietly released the 1,656-page "fourth national climate assessment." the report was posted on the national oceanic and atmospheric administration's website, but not on the EPA or commerce department websites, in contrast to the Obama administration.
Source: GovExec
Removing Press Credentials
The White House suspended the press credentials for CNN correspondent Jim Acosta after a heated exchange. The dispute continued for two weeks and CNN filed a lawsuit over the suspension, compelling the administration to restore Acosta’s press badge.
Source: New York Times
2019
February
Trump Forces Staff to Sign NDA’s
News breaks that the Trump administration requires all White House staff, including interns, to sign nondisclosure agreements during orientation, under threats from White House counsel that violating the DNA could result in legal and financial consequences.
Source: The Daily Beast
March
Trump Revokes Drone Reporting Rule
President Trump revokes a 2016 Obama Executive Order requiring US intelligence officials to publish statistics on the number of civilians killed by drone strikes outside of war zones.
Source: BBC
April
WH Won’t Comply with Congressional Subpoenas
The Trump administration continues to defy congressional subpoenas, in this instance concerning former White House counsel Don McGahn.
Source: Roll Call
Argentina Declassification
The Trump administration turned over a massive collection of intelligence records on human rights abuses in Argentina to the Argentine government. The cache totaled 47,000 pages of CIA, FBI, NSC, DOD, and State Department records, the largest government-to-government transfer of declassified documents. U.S. Archivist David Ferriero said that reviewers across 16 government agencies worked for a total of 32,000 hours to complete the task, which began during the Obama administration and was completed under the Trump administration and were able to release the documents 97% unredacted.
Source: National Security Archive
Trump Sues to Block Financial Disclosures
Trump and his three oldest children sued Deutsche Bank AG and Capital One Financial Corp to prevent them from complying with congressional subpoenas.
Source: New York Times
Trump Sues the Late Elijah Cummings
The President sued the late former House Oversight and Reform Committee chair, Rep. Elijah E. Cummings, to block a subpoena for financial information about his businesses.
Source: The Baltimore Sun
May
AG Barr’s New Declassification Powers
President Trump signed a presidential memo that “effectively amends” Executive Order 13526 on classification of national security information to grant Attorney General William Barr the “authority of the Director of National Intelligence to declassify intelligence information concerning the 2016 election.” Steve Aftergood reported the change on his Secrecy News blog, and notes that while the presidential memorandum only applies to AG Barr and not his successors, “the move represents a functional demotion of the Director of National Intelligence and a partial transfer of his authority to the Attorney General.” No explanation was given for the change and it is unclear whether the Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO), which is responsible for the government-wide security classification system, was consulted.
Source: Secrecy News
June
Health Care Price Transparency
President Trump signs an Executive Order that requires hospitals to publish prices for services negotiated with health insurers for a wide range of services and requires the Department of Health and Human Services to craft a policy and undergo a rule-making process.
Source: NPR
August
Advisory Panels Dismantled
The Trump administration moves to dismantle the JASON Defense Advisory Panel, which advises the U.S. government on defense science and technology matters. It is one of the many advisory panels the administration disbanded; others include a State Department panel dealing with nuclear nonproliferation, the Independent Security Advisory Board, which was suspended in 2018. Two Navy committees were also on the chopping block this February – the Naval Research Advisory Committee and the Secretary of the Navy Advisory Panel.
Source: Reuters
September
Can a Tweet be Classified?
President Trump tweets an image that appears to confirm the existence of a highly classified U.S. reconnaissance satellite in connection to a rocket explosion at the Imam Khomeini Space Center in Iran.
Source: NPR
What Press Briefings?
The White House goes six months without a press briefing from the press secretary.
Source: ABC News
October
Regulatory Guidance Transparency
The Trump administration issued an Executive Order requiring transparency in agency guidance documents; the order also requires agencies to publish the documents on their webpage in a searchable, indexed format.
Source: The White House
Dog: Declassified
President Trump reveals the name (Conan) and image of the military dog involved in the raid that killed ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in Syria.
Source: Business Insider
November
AG Barr Slams FOIA
The Trump administration’s AG slams FOIA at the Federalist Society’s 2019 National Lawyers Convention. Barr’s speech focused primarily on the “steady encroachment on Presidential authority by the other branches of government,” although his speech did not mention that the White House is also exempt from FOIA. Barr says:
“There is no FOIA for Congress or the Courts. Yet Congress has happily created a regime that allows the public to seek whatever documents it wants from the Executive Branch at the same time that individual congressional committees spend their days trying to publicize the Executive’s internal decisional process. That process cannot function properly if it is public, nor is it productive to have our government devoting enormous resources to squabbling about what becomes public and when, rather than doing the work of the people.”
Source: Justice Department
WH Releases Zelensky Transcript (Kind of)
The White House, under pressure during the impeachment investigation, releases a rough transcript of President Trump’s call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky; the transcript is not verbatim and contains a number of curious ellipses that make it unclear if information is omitted or the speaker trailed off.
Source: CNBC
December
Grant Transparency
President Trump sings H.R. 150, the “Grant Reporting Efficiency and Agreements Transparency Act of 2019 or the GREAT Act,” which mandates the establishment of a government-wide data standard for information reported by grant recipients.
Source: The White House
2020
January
Trump Nixes Reporting Requirements
In a signing statement for the National Defense Authorization Act, the president indicated that he would not comply with the all of the congressional reporting and declassification provisions of the bill.
Source: Government Executive
February
Making Phone Calls Private
Trump, after the impeachment scandal, suggests that he may end the practice of having administrative officials listen in on future calls with foreign heads of state.
Source: Vanity Fair
March
Trump Classifies Coronavirus Talks
The White House orders federal health officials to take the unusual step of classifying all high-level coronavirus meetings – a move that excludes experts from meetings and could hamper the government’s response to the pandemic.
Source: Reuters
Trump Silences Pandemic IG
Immediately after signing a $2 trillion coronavirus stimulus package that, among other things, created a new Special Inspector General for Pandemic Recovery - a role charged with notifying “Congress immediately if the administration ‘unreasonably’ withholds information requested by investigators” - President Trump released a signing statement stating the IG would not be allowed to notify Congress without “presidential supervision”.
Source: The Washington Post
April
FEMA Seizes Med Supplies Without Explanation
Hospital officials across seven states report that the Federal Emergency Management Agency is both seizing orders of medical supplies - purchased with taxpayer money - without publicly reporting the seizures or explaining why and where they are being re-routed.
Source: LA Times
Trump Ignores Transparency Rules in Meetings with Biz Leaders
The President sought advice from over 200 business leaders on how to re-open the economy amid the novel coronavirus pandemic. The conversations - which took place over four conference calls - were kept private, running afoul of the Federal Advisory Committee Act’s requirements to hold open meetings and issue public reports. The White House said the FACA transparency rules should not apply, because the outside advisory group wasn’t trying to build consensus recommendations.
Source: Politico
DOJ Doubles Down on 9/11 State Secrets Claim
Attorney General Barr refused to release 9/11 documents to the victim's families in a civil suit against the Saudi Government, going so far as to maintain that the justifications for the withholding would imperil national security if they were released. The move came months after Trump promised to help families get access to the records.
Source: ProPublica
May
Trump Fires IG Investigating Mike Pompeo
In an ongoing assault against inspectors general, President Trump fired State Department investigator Steve Linick. Linick was investigating Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for a “potential abuse of office.”
Source: The Guardian
Belated OMB FOIA Fee Regs Tank
The Office of Management and Budget issued revisions to its uniform FOIA Fee Guidelines, which dated from 1987 and govern when and how all agencies can charge FOIA fees. The revisions were unconscionably belated, were undertaken not voluntarily but because of an Administrative Procedures Act lawsuit filed by Cause of Action, and did not go far enough to address three major flaws that the guidelines have had since their inception. The National Security Archive joined open government groups in issuing comments on the revisions, faulting them for failing to protect non-traditional members of the news media, and not addressing widespread “fee bullying”.
Source: The National Security Archive
Trump Admin Asks SCOTUS to Hide Mueller Docs from House Leaders
In a 37-page filing, the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to shield “redacted grand jury materials related to former special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe from the Democratic-led House.”
Source: The Hill
2nd Circuit Helps Hide WH Visitor Logs
The 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against the National Security Archive’s lawsuit to restore the routine disclosure, under the FOIA, of the White House visitor logs that were taken down by the Trump administration in early 2017.
The 2nd Circuit’s 22-page ruling concentrates on the ostensible intrusion on a president’s ability to receive confidential advice, and the supposed burden of using FOIA’s regular exemptions to process the logs for release, while never acknowledging that the Obama White House routinely published its visitor logs some 90 days after the visit – some six million such records in all – with no apparent hindrance on presidential activity.
Source: The National Security Archive
June
Trump Admin Wins Hospital Transparency Victory
D.C. District Court Judge Carl Nichols upheld a Trump administration policy requiring hospitals to publish the negotiated prices for health services. The suit was brought by the American Hospital Association, which argued “that the publication of the prices could have perverse effects.” Judge Nichols disagreed, and noted in his decision that hospitals “are essentially attacking transparency measures generally, which are intended to enable consumers to make informed decisions.”
Source: The New York Times
Trump administration Says Bailout Money Will Stay Secret
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin told Congress that the Trump administration will keep the names of the businesses that received more than $500 billion in COVID-19 bailout funds through the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) secret, saying the information was confidential.
Source: Public Citizen
Trump Administration Drops Absurd PPP Secrecy
In an abrupt about-face, Secretary Mnuchin said the administration will publicly disclose the names of PPP recipients.
Source: Voice of America
Trump Administration Deploys Unidentified Federal Agents to Intimidate Protestors
The Trump administration deployed federal officers dressed in riot gear and no identification to intimidate protestors near the White House. The move would be escalated the following month in Portland, Ore., with reports of “camouflage-clad officers without clear identification badges using force and unmarked vehicles to transport arrested protesters.”
Source: The New York Times and AMNY
ICE Designated a Security Agency
In a blow to transparency, the Trump administration designated Immigration and Customs Enforcement a “Security Agency”. The security classification grants ICE employees the same status as intelligence agency officials and officials at keystone law enforcement agencies like the FBI and Secret Service. The designation, which applies to all ICE employees, “blocks from disclosure information that is typically public, such as name, job title, and salary.” The classification, which ICE argued for years was needed to protect its employees’ privacy, comes four months after the Trump administration designated Customs and Border Protection a Security Agency, signaling a possible shift away from the immigration agencies’ original mandates.
Source: The Nation
July
Trump Administration Redacts Transition Meeting Notes
Thanks to the 2015 Presidential Transitions Improvement Act amendments to the 1963 Presidential Transition Act, each presidential administration must “establish a White House coordinating committee and council of agency transition directors six months prior to the election.” In response to a FOIA request for the meeting minutes, however, the General Services Administration released only one document – almost entirely redacted pursuant to FOIA’s widely-abused Exemption 5. The Paulette Goddard Professor of Public Service at New York University, Paul Light, said, “If there’s anything that needs to be redacted that’s a sign that there’s something that shouldn’t be going on. This should be an open and fully transparent process.”
Source: Government Executive
Former CIA Director Brennan Denied Official Records
In a sharp break from tradition, the CIA denied former director John Brennan access to his official records, “including his notes and any documents that he had reviewed and signed that were classified,” which he sought to compile his memoir. Brennan – a frequent Trump critic – reveals in his memoir, “Undaunted: My Fight Against America’s Enemies, at Home and Abroad” – that in August 2018, President Trump issued a directive allegedly forbidding anyone in the intelligence community from sharing classified information with him (that same month, Trump threatened to revoke Brennan’s security clearance, something that Brennan said never came to pass because there was no legal basis).
Mark Zaid, a lawyer who frequently represents government whistleblowers and former intelligence officials navigating the murky prepublication review process, called the move “unprecedented”.
Source: The Washington Post
September
Trump Keeps Fighting to Keep Tax Returns Secret
After the Supreme Court denied the Trump administration’s efforts to keep secret years of tax returns and other financial documents, the president’s lawyers “wrote to the federal judge in Manhattan who originally presided over the case, saying they planned to argue that the district attorney’s subpoena seeking eight years of his corporate and personal tax returns was too broad and politically motivated.”
Source: The New York Times
The Bolton Book Saga: Anatomy of a White House Cover-Up
The politicization of the prepublication review process for former National Security Adviser John Bolton’s book, The Room Where it Happened, was laid bare in remarkable detail in a September court filing. In the filing Ellen Knight, the former National Security Council official who spent four months meticulously reviewing the manuscript for publication with her team, attests that her decisions were overruled by a secret second review conducted by a political appointee with no experience with the prepublication review process. When Knight confronted White House lawyers attempting to block the book’s publication, she suggested they were only intervening "because the most powerful man in the world said that it needed to happen.” The court document asserts that in response, "several [attorneys] registered their agreement with that diagnosis of the situation.”
The Justice Department remains committed to pursuing its case that Ambassador Bolton’s book contains classified information. On September 15 it opened a criminal investigation into whether Bolton disclosed national security information in his book.
Source: The National Security Archive
3rd Party Vaccine Contracts Prevent Oversight
The administration's widely-touted program to develop a vaccine for the coronavirus is skirting oversight. NPR reports, “Instead of entering into contracts directly with vaccine makers, more than $6 billion in Operation Warp Speed funding has been routed through a defense contract management firm called Advanced Technologies International, Inc. ATI then awarded contracts to companies working on COVID-19 vaccines. As a result, the contracts between the pharmaceutical companies and ATI may not be available through public records requests, and additional documents are exempt from public disclosure for five years.”
Source: NPR
Trump Uses DOJ Lawyers in E. Jean Carroll Suit
Trump replaced the private legal team representing him in the defamation lawsuit brought b E. Jean Carroll, who has accused Trump of raping her in the 1990s, with government lawyers. The “highly unusual move” means that taxpayers are representing Mr. Trump in the suit, and a Justice Department motion filed with the court also effectively protects Mr. Trump from any embarrassing disclosures in the middle of his campaign for re-election.”
Source: The New York Times
Trump Officials Interfere with COVID Reporting
Politically-appointed officials at HHS demanded - and received - the right to seek and review changes to the CDC’s weekly scientific report on the novel coronavirus “in what officials characterized as an attempt to intimidate the reports’ authors and water down their communications to health professionals.”
Source: Politico
Melania Trump Accused of Using Personal Email for Work
A book by First Lady Melania Trump’s former adviser, Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, alleges that Mrs. Trump “regularly used a private Trump Organization email account, an email from a MelaniaTrump.com domain, iMessage and the encrypted messaging app Signal while in the White House” for conducting official government business. The Presidential Records Act technically allows White House officials to use their personal email for official business, but the emails must be copied on official government servers “not later than 20 days” after they were created.
Source: The Washington Post
NYT Obtains Trump Tax Records; Shows Trump Paid $750 in Taxes
The New York Times obtained two decades' worth of Trump's tax information. The records showed that in 2016 and 2017 the president paid only $750 in federal income taxes, and he paid no taxes for 10 of the previous 15 years. The records - which Trump has been aggressively trying to hide - "show that he depends more and more on making money from businesses that put him in potential and often direct conflict of interest with his job as president."
Source: The New York Times
October
Trump administration Fails to Keep Nation Informed on Key Details of President’s Illness
President Trump announced on Twitter on October 2 that both he and the First Lady tested positive for COVID-19, and shortly after he checked into Walter Reed for treatment. The details surrounding the severity of his illness, as well as key details about his last negative COVID test, were murky, and multiple press conferences held by his doctors failed to provide a complete picture of the President’s health.
Soon after news broke, NBC reported that Trump asked Walter Reed doctors to sign nondisclosure agreements during his November 2019 visit before they could be allowed to be part of his treatment - a highly unusual move.
Ongoing Politicization of Clinton/Russian Election Interference Declassifications
President Trump instructed the government to complete a "total declassification of any & all documents" related to both Hillary Clinton's emails and the investigation into Russian election interference — "No redactions!”, he said. The DOJ argued in court that it wasn’t required to abide by the tweet in the course of a FOIA lawsuit, because it wasn’t accompanied by an official declassification order - and it would continue to redact the material.
Simultaneously - both at the end of September and in early October - Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe selectively declassified information “that included sensitive intelligence about Russians discussing Hillary Clinton and her 2016 presidential campaign”. Critics have called the actions tantamount to spreading Russian disinformation for political purposes.
Court Accepts White House's Backtracking of Trump's Declassification Tweet
Trump's Chief of Staff Mark Meadows claimed in a court filing that the President hadn't meant it when he ordered the "total declassification" of documents related to the Mueller investigation, saying "The President indicated to me that his statements on Twitter were not self-executing declassification orders and do not require the declassification or release of any particular documents." The filing came in a FOIA lawsuit for the records, and prompted U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton to accept the White House's explanation. Judge Walton said, “While it’s unfortunate the words were spoken the way they were spoken, I think I am constrained to conclude there was no further expansion, and therefore there is no need for further review of the documents.”
Source: The Washington Post
Trump's Secret Chinese Bank Account
Tax information obtained by the New York Times reveals that China is the third foreign nation - the first two being Britain and Ireland - where the president maintains a bank account. "The foreign accounts do not show up on Mr. Trump’s public financial disclosures, where he must list personal assets, because they are held under corporate names. The identities of the financial institutions are not clear."
Source: The New York Times