http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31373407/ns/politics-white_house/

The Obama administration is fighting to block access to names of visitors to the White House, taking up the Bush administration argument that a president doesn’t have to reveal who comes calling to influence policy decisions.

Despite President Barack Obama’s pledge to introduce a new era of transparency to Washington, and despite two rulings by a federal judge that the records are public, the Secret Service has denied msnbc.com’s request for the names of all White House visitors from Jan. 20 to the present. It also denied a narrower request by the nonpartisan watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which sought logs of visits by executives of coal companies.

CREW says it will file a lawsuit Tuesday against the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the Secret Service.

What he meant was that he’d be totally transparent about what he’s hiding from everyone. See… now everything makes sense.

http://online.wsj.com/

WASHINGTON — A federal judge ruled Monday that a White House office that has records about millions of possibly missing emails doesn’t have to make them public.

U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly says the Office of Administration is not subject to the Freedom of Information Act, enabling the White House to maintain the secrecy of a lengthy internal paper trail about its problem-plagued email system.

The decision came in a lawsuit filed against the administration by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a private group that has been trying to find out the extent of the White House’s email problems for more than a year. The functions of the Office of Administration “are strictly administrative,” Judge Kollar-Kotelly ruled.

Judge Kollar-Kotelly said the Office of Administration has no authority over others in the executive branch and that the office is exclusively dedicated to providing services to the Executive Office of the President.

Since its creation in 1978, the Office of Administration has responded to FOIA requests. But the Bush White House reversed that policy in August 2007 in the lawsuit filed by CREW.

http://www.cnn.com

In January, the White House said it cannot rule out that it may have lost certain e-mails. The possibly lost e-mails are from a period in which the United States decided to go to war with Iraq…

As if we needed another example of how inefficient and broken Washington is.

I certainly saw this ruling coming a mile away, just as I can see these “lost” emails mysteriously resurfacing some time after today’s events become a talking point in a US history book. There’s room for debate on whether or not the Office of Administration can be held subject to the Freedom of Information Act, but I think we can all agree that for what we’re paying Washington, this should never happen.