Ethics

Meet the New Boss....part....what, 27 now?

By Ed Brayton

Yet another instance of the Obama administration stifling transparency the same way the Bush administration did, this time by denying access to White House visitor logs. We went through this with Bush when Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) requested those same logs and a federal judge ruled that they could not withhold them under FOIA. Now Obama is making the exact same argument Bush tried and failed with in order to keep the public from knowing about visits by coal company executives to the White House.

"The Obama administration has now taken exactly the same position as the Bush administration, telling us the visitor logs are presidential records," said Anne Weismann, the legal counsel for CREW. "I don't see how you can keep people from knowing who visits the White House and adhere to a policy of openness and transparency. The discrepancy between the rhetoric and the policy is especially great."

Full post as published by Dispatches from the Culture Wars on June 17, 2009 (boomark / email).