DUCKWORTH, LEAHY RE-INTRODUCE BILL TO STRENGTHEN OVERSIGHT OF EXECUTIVE BRANCH & INCREASE TRANSPARENCY
Press Release, Sen. Tammy Duckworth, Mar. 16, 2022
Today, during the News Leaders Association's annual Sunshine Week that aims to promote transparency across our government, U.S. Senators Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) and Patrick Leahy (D-VT) re-introduced legislation—the Demanding Oversight and Justification Over Legal Conclusions Transparency Act (DOJ OLC Transparency Act)—to strengthen oversight over the Executive Branch and increase government transparency by requiring the U.S. Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) to publicly disclose all past legal opinions, as well as any it produces moving forward. Too often, legal opinions provided by the DOJ OLC are treated as binding by federal agencies, even though neither Congress nor the American public have access to all of these legal interpretations, which also have no Congressional or judicial oversight. In the past, secret DOJ OLC opinions have been used to justify torture and the claim that the President cannot be indicted while in office dates back to a famous Nixon-era OLC publication.
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