Free Republic

Since 2009, press access to the White House has been notably restricted, whistleblower prosecutions have spiked, and Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuits against the federal government have reached an all-time high. In 2013, the Committee to Protect Journalists published a scathing report, written by former Washington Post editor Leonard Downie Jr., on the Obama administration's obsession with controlling media coverage and burnishing its image.... The most immediate change was a sudden clampdown on unauthorized comments and interviews. The Obama administration made sure the word got out: The only people who talk to journalists are public affairs officers. In 2014,...

President Obama has issued 145 “midnight” regulations with a cost of more than $21 billion since the election of Donald Trump, the most by a lame-duck president in a generation, a study has found. The conservative American Action Forum said Thursday that Mr. Obama’s rules, issued from Nov. 8 through Dec. 31 of last year, include 31 “economically significant” regulations with a cost of at least $100 million each.

Scandal, what scandal? President Obama has been squeaky clean, according to his closest adviser, Valerie Jarrett. “The president prides himself on the fact that his administration hasn’t had a scandal and he hasn’t done something to embarrass himself,” Jarrett said in an interview broadcast on CNN Sunday.

White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest expressed annoyance that President Obama doesn't get enough credit for being the "most transparent" president in history. . . . Earnest added that there is really "no constituency in American politics for transparency in government beyond journalists."

Incoming Florida House Speaker Richard Corcoran cut his teeth on the Florida house appropriations committee, but he's got bigger aspirations than merely appropriations as he assumes his leadership position: he wants to make the Florida legislature the most transparent in the country, and he’s willing to take on his own party to do it.Legislators around the country could learn from Corcoran’s ambitious agenda.While Florida has a reputation for a hard-partying coastal vacation destination, its state capitol’s politics may take more cues from the notorious “good ol’ boys’ network” that other more traditionally Southern states have. Reformers have targeted Tallahassee, claiming...

When President Obama took office, he gave journalists great hope by promising unprecedented transparency. The reality has proven to be eight years of slippage in nearly every facet of openness. As the president prepares to leave office, the Society of Professional Journalists have noted the disappointing shortfalls. Forty journalism and open-government groups sent a letter to White House press secretary Josh Earnest* in September after he called for journalists to give the president credit for improvements in government transparency. The Society of Professional Journalists and other groups have “repeatedly outlined to the administration various ways in which transparency has gotten...

President Obama delivers his final military speech to members of the military and public Tuesday afternoon in Tampa, Florida. "Let my final words to you as your Commander-in-Chief be a reminder of what it is that you’re fighting for, what it is that we are fighting for," he said. ................. PRESIDENT OBAMA: " Number five, transparency and accountability serve our national security not just in times of peace, but, more importantly, in times of conflict. .......... And yesterday, I directed our government for the first time to release a full description of the legal and policy frameworks that guide our...

President Barack Obama will deliver a major address Tuesday in Florida to explain the policies his administration established over the past eight years on suspected terrorists, while making a push for the transparency his critics have said for years does not exist. Obama will explain in his speech, being delivered at the military's Central Command headquarters at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, also the home of Special Operations Command, the legal and policy rationale used by the administration to decide whether terrorists should be killed, interrogated, or detained, reports The Los Angeles Times, which notes the president will be...

Have you had enough of them, yet? I have Nothing happened today. I know, because I read the news. That is, nothing they SAID happened…happened. Oh, according to the “media,” Trump had gone to a private family dinner the night before—without the media—and so the media screamed he was perpetrating a new, brutal, unmatched-in-human-history, repressive Dark Age of non-transparency.

Headline of the Day Poll Should Trump keep ditching the press? No, transparency in an administration is too important Yes. Everybody should shun the press.

HAHAHAHAHAHA Brace yourselves. You’re in for a bit of a shock. Last night, President-elect Donald Trump went out to dinner. ...And he didn’t notify the press. I know, I know. You’re furious. I’ll give you a moment to recover.

The Clinton Foundation reported Thursday that it has received as much as $26.4 million in previously undisclosed payments from major corporations, universities, foreign sources and other groups. The disclosure came as the foundation faced questions over whether it fully complied with a 2008 ethics agreement to reveal its donors and whether any of its funding sources present conflicts of interest for Hillary Rodham Clinton as she begins her presidential campaign.

Earlier today we wrote about a new Project Veritas undercover video that uncovered several democratic operatives openly discussing, in explicit detail, how to commit massive voter fraud. One of the operatives was a person by the name of Robert Creamer who is a co-founder of a democratic consulting firm called Democracy Partners. Within the video, an undercover journalist details a plan to register Hispanic voters illegally by having them work as contractors, to which Creamer can be heard offering support saying that “there are a couple of organizations that that’s their big trick" (see: "Rigging Elections For 50 Years" -...

According to a report by the inspector general of the General Services Administration, Obama administration political operatives continuously slow walked open records requests and punished the legal group Judicial Watch for their activism. Judicial Watch has several FOIA lawsuits against the administration and in every case, the administration sought to delay complying with the requests, even going so far as to overcharge the group for fees related to the searches.

To some degree every White House Press Secretary is shilling for their President, but Josh Earnest has gone the extra mile. Where some might be willing to dodge questions and lie, Earnest is willing to write angry old man letters to the editor op-eds in which he both denies obfuscation AND demands you give his administration props for its record-setting level of transparency. I’ll say this for the guy: He has a job to do, and he does it with gusto. Special: Actress Melissa McCarthy Stuns Millions by Losing 35 Oh sure, that job is shilling for the least transparent,...

A resident of a township in southeastern Michigan thinks she was wrongly denied a request for township documents related to a proposed landfill expansion. Salem Township denied the Freedom of Information Act request, saying the information the requester asked for did not exist. But records subsequently acquired from Washtenaw County show that the relevant documents do exist, and were in the township’s possession when the request was submitted. Tracey Birkenhauer of Northville sent a FOIA request to Salem Township on March 25, 2016, requesting all documentation submitted to the township since 2010 regarding the expansion of the Arbor Hills landfill....

A spokesman for the U.S. Department of State broke out laughing at a Thursday press conference after introducing the event as an exercise in “transparency” and democracy. The spokesman referred to some Department interns in the back row, then tried to choke out a formality but just couldn’t do it.

The AP review of Clinton's calendar — her after-the-fact, official chronology of the events of her four-year term — identified at least 75 meetings with longtime political donors and loyalists, Clinton Foundation contributors and corporate and other outside interests that were either not recorded or listed with identifying details scrubbed. The AP found the omissions by comparing the 1,500-page document with separate planning schedules supplied to Clinton by aides in advance of each day's events. The names of at least 114 outsiders who met with Clinton were missing from her calendar, the records show.

Third rebuke of administration’s transparency this yearThe White House showed “bad faith” in how it handled an open-records request for global warming data, a federal court ruled Monday, issuing yet another stinging rebuke to the administration for showing a lack of transparency. For President Obama, who vowed to run the most transparent government in U.S. history, Judge Amit P. Mehta’s ruling granting legal “discovery” in an open-records case — the third time this year a judge has ordered discovery — is an embarrassing black eye. In this most recent case, the Competitive Enterprise Institute was trying to force the White...

California union workers will continue to be in the dark about how their dues are spent after a bill that would’ve forced unions to post this information online was killed along a party-line vote. California’s public employee unions used their muscle this week to fight back a legislative bid to open their books, killing in committee a bill that would force them to post online how dues are spent -- and a second bill requiring a union vote every two years. "These members want to belong to a union. They want to be represented by a union. They just want to...