Hillary Clinton gave a memorable start to Sunshine Week. Though not in ways the former Secretary of State intended, Clinton’s chilly March 10th press conference raised open government and freedom of information issues to a new level of public interest.
Clinton tried without much success to explain why the world’s most prominent diplomat created an email network that was run by a server in her home in affluent Chappaqua, New York. Tens of thousands of the messages that Clinton and her team deemed relevant to public business have been turned over to the State Department. Tens of thousands of others, Clinton announced, have been deleted.
The self-contained system shows the contortions some public officials and their palace guard will perform to block the public from learning what’s done in its name. Clinton never had a State Department email and neither did her two top aides, Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills. They also used the Clinton home server. Communications exclusively among the three would be in their sole possession, making it easy for them to remain in the shadow of secrecy.
Clinton’s taste for secrecy and her imminent second bid for the presidency have elevated the use of private email systems for the conduct of public business. The issue did not end with the conclusion of Sunshine Week. Instead, it reminded the nation that open government requires constant vigilance.
The Clinton email triggered an examination of the email practices in the crowded bullpen of Republican presidential hopefuls. Revealing your email practices may become one of the benchmarks of the 2016 presidential race. It will be like the Zoe Baird test of the 1990s. She was the highflying corporate lawyer whose failure to pay taxes for the illegal immigrants who worked as her chauffeur and nanny scuttled her 1993 nomination for Attorney General in the Clinton administration. A nanny problem became a litmus test for public figures—and blaming it on your spouse, as Baird tried to do, was deemed no defense.
Though the nation’s political class grows more high falutin’ in its love of luxuries, politicians’ email accounts still outnumber the nannies and chauffeurs they employ. The email test will be a challenge for Republican New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. His scheming aides used private email accounts to punish the Democratic mayor of Fort Lee, New Jersey, and drivers using the George Washington Bridge in 2013. Arrogance with dashes of secrecy makes for a noxious cocktail in government.
The battle to protect the public’s right to know how its business is conducted never ends. Special interests and their friends in government do not cease in contriving to put a veil over what goes on in government. The Hillary Clinton email revelations brought into public view the astounding New York executive branch policy of destroying emails after just 90 days.
In Massachusetts, the Secretary of State, arbiter of what’s public and what is not, ruled that a police report on the arrest of a police officer should be kept secret. He came to the bizarre conclusion that the arrest report is a personnel matter and exempt from public scrutiny. The enemies of the public interest are everywhere.
Your right to examine important and mundane documents is seen as a threat by those who prosper in a system of debts and favors that thrives in darkness. Unions try to chip away at right to know laws with their bargaining agreements. Businesses try to evade exposure of the details of taxpayer-financed corporate welfare.
Enforcing the public’s right to know is often expensive and time consuming. The penalties at many levels of government for violating the Freedom of Information Act are often weak and cheap to pay. It’s easier to apologize than to comply in the timely manner the law envisions.
The hostility to freedom of information laws within government was best illustrated at the end of Sunshine Week. The White House office in charge of responding to requests under the Freedom of Information Act obliterated a regulation subjecting that office to, you guessed it, the Freedom of Information Act.
The fight will never end because government refuses to break its love affair with secrecy and its contempt for the public.
