There are always unintended consequences. Sometimes those consequences continue for a generation. Recent events illustrate that.<\/p>\n
On Sunday, The Wall Street Journal<\/a> posted an article about the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)<\/a>. President Lyndon Johnson<\/a> signed the act on July 4, 1966. President Johnson referred to FOIA as \u201cthe damned thing\u201d when he signed it.<\/p>\n The article reports:<\/p>\n Bill Moyers<\/a>, LBJ\u2019s press secretary at the time, recalled in a 2003 broadcast how FOIA nearly didn\u2019t become law: The president \u201chated the very idea of a Freedom of Information Act, hated the idea of journalists rummaging in government closets, hated them challenging the official view of reality.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n I am sure Hillary Clinton would have agreed with him.<\/p>\n The article reports:<\/p>\n Mrs. Clinton stonewalled FOIA requests for years with her keep-no-records, produce-no-records strategy. In a deposition last month in a civil lawsuit challenging her personal email server, the State Department<\/a> said its staffers in charge of records didn\u2019t realize until 2014 that its former boss had used private email.<\/strong><\/p>\n Appropriately enough, Mrs. Clinton\u2019s explanation that she used a private email server to keep her records secret only became public in a lawsuit challenging the State Department\u2019s insistence that it couldn\u2019t respond to FOIA requests because it couldn\u2019t locate her emails on its .gov server.<\/strong><\/p>\n The State Department\u2019s inspector general in May ruled that Mrs. Clinton broke record-keeping laws such as those requiring compliance with FOIA requests, never got permission for her home server and ignored numerous security warnings.<\/strong><\/p>\n …the judges (federal appeals court judges in Washington, DC<\/a>) said evading government servers is no defense against a FOIA request:<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cIf a department head can deprive the citizens of their right to know what his department is up to by the simple expedient of maintaining his departmental emails on an account in another domain, that purpose is hardly served,\u201d the judges wrote. \u201cIt would make as much sense to say that the department head could deprive requestors of hard-copy documents by leaving them in a file at his daughter\u2019s house and then claiming that they are under her control.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n The article also reminds us that there are indications that Russian agents hacked the servers of the Clinton Foundation and the Democratic National Committee. That means that Vladimir Putin<\/a> has all sorts of information he can either release in October or hold over Mrs. Clinton’s head if she becomes President. Her desire to hide information from the public has potentially damaged American national security.<\/p>\n A representative republic (which America is) relies on informed voters to maintain freedom. When people work against informing the voters, it hurts us all. The fact that Washington, DC, has become a city where wealthy elite politicians govern for their own good may explain why Donald Trump<\/a> has done so well in this campaign cycle. Because Donald Trump may well go into Washington and clean house, he is opposed by the Washington elites. This opposition will become more obvious at the Republican National Convention and in the press coverage he receives between now and the November election. It is up to Americans<\/a> to decide whether they want more Washington secrecy and elitist government or whether they want someone to clean house.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There are always unintended consequences. Sometimes those consequences continue for a generation. Recent events illustrate that. On Sunday, The Wall Street Journal posted an article about the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). President Lyndon Johnson signed the act on July … Continue reading