White House office to delete its FOIA regulations

[Fred Sanders]

5. The entire detailed legislative and legal history is what some folks are missing. Obama's White

House, Obama's rules of where to draw the line on Executive immunity.

Already approved by federal Circuit Court of Appeals.



"In a notice to be published in Tuesday's Federal Register, the White House says it's removing regulations on how the Office of Administration complies with Freedom of Information Act Requests based on "well-settled legal interpretations."

......

"This is an office that operated under the FOIA for 30 years, and when it became politically inconvenient, they decided they weren't subject to the Freedom of Information Act any more," said Tom Fitton of the conservative Judicial Watch.

That happened in the Bush administration, when CREW sued over e-mails deleted by the White House — as many as 22 million of them, by one accounting. The White House at first began to comply with that request, but then reversed course.

"The government made an argument in an effort to throw everything and the kitchen sink into the lawsuit in order to stop the archiving of White House e-mails," said om Blanton, the director of the National Security Archive at George Washington University, which has used similar requests to shed light on foreign policy decisions.