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Tag: freedom of information act

AP Photo/Christian K. Lee, File

Rahm Emanuel Withholds Records on Possible Involvement in Chicago School Contract Scandal

Last week, a former Chicago Public Schools (CPS) CEO was indicted on charges that she took bribes while steering up to $23 million in no-bid contracts to a consulting firm she once worked for, and some wonder if Emanuel’s office had a hand in that scandal. But the mayor’s office is blocking the release of records that could shed light on that relationship.

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Hackers Have a Field Day at the Department of Energy

Does anyone in the Administration think the public should have been told their massive Energy Department – which is primarily concerned with interfering with energy production, not creating it – was hit by hackers over a thousand times, and successfully penetrated on 159 occasions? We needed USA Today to choke the news out of them with a FOIA request?

Workers prepare the plinth (L), where the monument of the last Russian Emperor, Tsar Nicholas II, will be placed in Belgrade on October 13, 2014. According to local media reports, the monument will be unveiled later this year during a ceremony marking the WWI centenary and is a donation by the Russian Federation. On October 16, Russian President Vladimir Putin will visit and attend a military parade marking the 70th anniversary of Belgrade's liberation from fascist occupation.

State Dept. Appoints ‘Transparency Czar’ After Clinton Email Scandal

Czars are often dropped as distractions, like a fighter jet ejecting flares to avoid heat-seeking missiles. The appointment of a powerful new position with great fanfare is the ultimate Washington way of pretending to Do Something and mollify an angry public. And so, there comes unto the State Department a new “transparency czar,” officially to be known as the Transparency Coordinator.

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Surprise! IRS Finally Reveals Lois Lerner’s Secret Email Account

The government’s boasts of transparency and accountability stand revealed as toxic illusions. There is nothing “transparent” about answering pertinent questions years later. No one is held accountable at all, even though a strong case can be made that the politicized IRS tipped the 2012 election. Rest assured, that case would be made very loudly if this was the tale of a Republican president’s re-election campaign intimidating minority and environmentalist groups by slow-walking their tax-exempt applications.

AP Photo/Charles Dharapak

Obama Administration Sets Another Record For Government Secrecy

Under the most transparent administration ever, when you read a news story about some blockbuster tidbit of information retrieved with a Freedom of Information Act “request,” the truth is that the information was almost always pried loose with a FOIA lawsuit. The requests don’t go anywhere, unless they’re for entirely innocuous info. Lawsuits are what penetrate the Obama stone wall, and those take a long time to resolve.

AP Photo/Seth Wenig

Former FOIA Overseer Calls Hillary’s Email Defense ‘Laughable’

It’s not news, but the Clinton email scandal reminds us that the increasingly despotic Democrat Party thinks representative government should be done away with, replaced by a single election every four years to empower a unitary gridlock-free imperial executive. The emperor, or empress, can’t be distracted by peasants who forget their place and file Freedom of Information Act requests, either.

Gary Cameron / Reuters

Hillary Clinton Emails: Associated Press May Sue over Stonewalled FOIA Requests

The Associated Press is considering legal action to force the State Department to fulfill various Freedom of Information Requests, some as old as 2010, that have gone unfulfilled. The threat comes after a Congressional investigation of the Benghazi scandal found former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton conducted all of her official business at the State Department with a private email account hosted on a server inside her own home.