Townhall.com ^ | June 5, 2013 | Michelle Malkin
Sun, sun, sun, here it comes. Welcome to the Summer of Belated Epiphanies.
Media lapdogs are finally, finally arriving at the conclusion that maybe this
isn't the most transparent administration in world history, after all.
On Tuesday, the Associated Press reported on the Obama administration's use
of secret email accounts, stonewalling on Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)
requests and attempted shakedown of reporters seeking public information on just
how widespread the disclosure evasion might be.
Take note: It wasn't the AP that originally uncovered Team Obama's penchant
for email sock-puppetry. Chris Horner, Competitive Enterprise Institute fellow
and author of "The Liberal War on Transparency," first exposed former EPA Chief
Lisa Jackson's Internet alter ego, "Richard Windsor," last year. The free-market
environmental think tank filed suit against the government last fall seeking
records on the secret, illegal "secondary" email accounts of high-level EPA
officials after the agency ignored multiple FOIA filings.
Seven months after President Obama was re-elected, along comes the AP to
bolster Horner's assertion that the practice is not just isolated in one
bureaucracy. Corruptocrat Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius
(whose document-shredding, obstructionist history I chronicled last week)
maintained at least one FOIA-subverting address: KGS2@hhs.gov. So did Donald
Berwick, former head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and Gary
Cohen, a top Obamacare operative.
According to the AP, a whopping 10 agencies have not yet turned over lists of
email addresses, including EPA, the Pentagon, the departments of Veterans
Affairs, Transportation, Treasury, Justice, Housing and Urban Development,
Homeland Security, Commerce, and Agriculture.
And how's this for the audacity of opacity: Can you believe the Labor
Department initially asked the AP to pay more than $1 million for its email
addresses?
In a classic Captain Obvious moment, the Associated Press points out that
these hidden accounts "drive perceptions that government officials are trying to
hide actions or decisions." You don't say!
Hostility to transparency, of course, has been a hallmark of this
administration from top to bottom. As I reported from the very first days of the
Obama regime's vampiric tenure:
--Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for years fought disclosure of
massive donations from foreign governments and corporations who filled her
husband's library and foundation coffers.
--Former Labor Secretary Hilda Solis failed to disclose that she was director
and treasurer of a union-promoting lobbying group pushing legislation that she
was co-sponsoring.
--Attorney General Eric Holder overruled his own lawyers in the Justice
Department on the issue of D.C. voting rights (which he and Obama support) and
refused to make public the staffers' opinion that a House bill on the matter was
unconstitutional. His stone wall of obstruction extends from the New Black
Panther Party voting rights case to the Fast and Furious gun-walking scandal to
the Solyndra green boondoggle bankruptcy and Gitmo closure plans and conflicts
of interests -- all while touting a new "Open Plan for Government" from which he
has conveniently exempted himself.
--Former No. 2 official at the Department of Housing and Urban Development,
former King County, Wash., Executive Ron Sims, had the distinction of being the
most fined government official in his state's history for suppressing public
records from taxpayers.
--Former green czar Carol Browner infamously bullied auto execs to "put
nothing in writing, ever." She was singled out by the White House's own oil
spill panel for misleading the public about the scientific evidence for the
administration's draconian drilling moratorium. The Interior Department
inspector general and federal courts blasted drilling-ban book-cooking by both
Browner and former Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, who falsely rewrote the White
House drilling-ban report to doctor the Obama-appointed panel's own overwhelming
scientific objections to the job-killing edict, as a culture of contempt and
"determined disregard" for the law.
Remember: While head of the Clinton administration's EPA, Browner ordered a
staffer to purge and delete her computer files to evade a public disclosure
lawsuit. Lambasted by the judge for "contumacious" behavior and contempt of
court, Browner claimed it was all an innocent mistake -- and blamed her young
son for downloading games on her work computer that she was trying to erase.
And in case you'd forgotten, Obama set the tone by breaking his transparency
pledge with the very first bill he signed into law. In January 2009, the White
House announced that the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act had been posted online for
review. Oopsy: Obama had already signed it -- in violation of his "sunlight
before signing" pledge to post legislation for public comment on the White House
website five days before he sealed any deal.
In 2010, corporate lobbyists met hundreds of times with administration
officials at Starbucks, Caribou Coffee, even on a side lawn -- with the express
purpose of circumventing the public's right to know. The coffee loophole
klatches were arranged by Team Obama members using, you guessed it, personal
email accounts to communicate with the influence industry.
When Obama vowed that "transparency and the rule of law will be the
touchstones of this presidency," he didn't mean "touchstones." He meant
sinkholes.
Now, when Mr. Sunshine touts his reveal-as-we-say-not-as-we-conceal record,
I'll welcome company from the Johnnies-come-lately of the White House press who
see the truth and laugh out loud, rolling on the floor.
DIOGENES invites you to pull up a chair on this fine day and read posts from around the world. The writing may lean to the right...but that's the way Diogenes wants it! You may leave your opinion, but Diogenes rarely changes his! WELCOME!
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