White House not obligated to comply with Freedom of Information Act
Posted on June 16th, 2008 by laur Categories and Tags: Uncategorized, bureaucracy, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics, Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, conspiracy, CREW, Executive Office of the President, Freedom of Information Act, George W. Bush, Iraq, Office of Administration, United States, Washington, Washington DC, White House
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.
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.
