Why did President Obama rewrite the Freedom of Information Act without telling the rest of America?
An April 15, 2009, memo from then-White House Counsel Greg Craig instructed the executive branch to let White House officials review any documents sought by FOIA requestors that involved “White House equities.” You might rightly ask,
What the heck are White House Equities?
That phrase is nowhere to be found in the FOIA, yet the Obama White House effectively amended the law to create a new exception to justify keeping public documents locked away from the public.A serious breach
The Greg memo is described in detail in a new study made public today by Cause of Action, a Washington-based nonprofit watchdog group that monitors government transparency and accountability.
How serious an attack on the public’s right to know is the Obama administration’s invention of the “White House equities” exception?
“FOIA is designed to inform the public on government behavior; White House equities allow the government to withhold information from the media, and therefore the public, by having media requests forwarded for review. This not only politicizes federal agencies, it impairs fundamental First Amendment liberties,” Cause of Action explains in its report.
Equities are everything
The equities exception is breathtaking in its breadth. As the Greg memo put it, any document request is covered, including “congressional committee requests, GAO requests, judicial subpoenas and FOIA requests.”
And it doesn’t matter what format the documents happen to be in because, according to Greg, the equities exception “applies to all documents and records, whether in oral, paper, or electronic form, that relate to communications to and from the White House, including preparations for such communications.”
Essentially, the change gives the White House effective carte-blanche to decide what information it wants to divulge and how to present it, but perhaps just as sinister, the change means FOIA deadlines are a thing of the past. Since the White House equities exception took effect, it may potentially be impossible for some requests to meet the 20-day mandatory response deadline.
Is this actually “the most transparent administration in history?”
Source: Washington Examiner
Obama is ruining our country right before our eyes and nobody is doing anything about it.
hitler strike again
Because he is a g******n dictator out to destroy the American way. He is a illegal alien that is not legally aloud to be president, and needs to be executed for his crimes, and treason! Then everything he has done thrown out as well as the morons helping him!
impeach and imprison this Muslim bastard
IMPEACH!!!
I think the H in his middle name stands for “Hitler” instead of hussein.
https://m.facebook.com/pdgchange . Join now and help change the world and learn the secrets they don’t want you to know. Be part of change be part of the revolution will be.
The Freedom of Muslim act!
He jus got that “Jus Do Mentality”
criminal islamist radical isis supporting border damaging,irs manipulating,anti-American..treasoner .who releases 5 known america hater generals to attack us again? the penalty is .?..The United States federal government (in comparison to the separate states) applies the death penalty for certain crimes: treason, espionage, federal murder, large-scale drug trafficking, and attempting to kill a witness, juror, or court officer in certain cases. Military law allows execution of soldiers for several crimes. Executions by the federal government have been rare compared to those by state governments. Twenty-six federal (including military) executions have been carried out since 1950. Three of those (none of them military) have occurred in the modern post-Gregg era. This list only includes those executed under federal jurisdiction. The Federal Bureau of Prisons manages the housing and execution of federal death row prisoners. As of January 19, 2014, fifty-nine people are on the federal death row for men at the Federal Correctional Complex in Terre Haute, Indiana; while the two women on the federal death row are at Federal Medical Center, Carswell in Fort Worth, Texas.[1]