FOIA: A Colossus Under Assault
Nate Jones, Unredacted, Mar. 7, 2018
Just over a year ago, a Freedom of Information Act release by the National Park Service demonstrably proved that the President of the United States was lying about the size of his inauguration crowd. That he was even elected president was, in part, because his opponent had improperly stored federal records on a personal server as Secretary of State and her agency was systematically and untruthfully stating that “no records” of the Secretary’s emails could be located in response to FOIA requests.
A tiny sampling of the stories made possible by the Freedom of Information Act since then confirms that the law’s impact continues to remain gargantuan. We now know, thanks to FOIA: how the Drug Enforcement Administration was hamstrung from going after suspicious opiate shipments; how the Department of Justice uses parallel construction to construe illegal searches as legal; how Environmental Administrator Scott Pruitt was personally involved in scrubbing climate change data from his agency’s website; how Afghanistan and Iraq wars proceeded day by day from the Secretary of Defense’s desk; how investigations into suspicious deaths of Russians connected to Vladimir Putin on American soil are being conducted; how the Treasury Department justified its claim that recent tax cuts will generate $1.8 trillion in revenue (in just one page); how the rushed construction of a border wall would negatively impact one retirement community and three wildlife areas; and thousands more important local and national stories.
Far from being crippled and ineffective, as some have claimed, FOIA remains a colossus. It continues to give citizens a fighting chance to force their government to release documents that it would rather hide.
Read more here.