Issa says interview shows lack of transparency in Obama’s White House

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) is taking aim at the Obama administration’s level of transparency by pointing to a recent interview with a career Homeland Security official that raises questions about whether it has increased the amount of information it releases. 

William Holzerland, the Homeland Security official, told Republican
and Democratic staff on Issa’s Oversight and Government Reform panel earlier
this month that it was difficult to assess whether more information was being
disclosed by President Obama than by former President George W. Bush.

{mosads}“All in all, I would say no, there is not more
transparency,” he said in the interview. “We would have to go line by line,
page by page, through 138,000 requests’ worth of paper or other electronic
records in order for me to say that we have done more. But I would say, on
balance, I see little difference.”

Issa, the chairman of the Oversight panel, has scheduled a
hearing Thursday on the Department of Homeland Security’s openness, where he is expected to make a point of Holzerland’s interview. Lawmakers
will hear testimony from two political appointees from the DHS privacy office.

Issa’s office, which provided The Hill with an excerpt of the
interview, has been pursuing the issue of whether the DHS’s privacy office has
allowed political appointees to influence the disclosure of information
required for release under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

Holzerland, the DHS associate director for disclosure policy
and FOIA program development, said part of the
difficulty in characterizing whether the administration has become more
transparent revolves around how exemptions of information are tallied.

For example, he said, the department may redact five
sentences or one sentence from a document, but the agency’s annual report only
states that a redaction was made and does not indicate the number of sentences
that were redacted. For that reason the Obama administration may be redacting
less sentences, but the number of overall redactions may appear to be the
same as in previous years.

One of Obama’s first actions upon taking office was to issue
two memos to agency heads committing the administration to an “unprecedented
level of openness in government” and emphasizing the importance of the FOIA
process.

A spokeswoman for the department indicated that it has lived
up to Obama’s promises, saying that the backlog of FOIA requests had been
significantly reduced and that more requests were processed than received last
year.

“This administration has made significant progress in both
responsive and proactive disclosures,” said Amy Kudwa, a DHS spokeswoman.

“Specific to FOIA, we have reduced the FOIA backlog by 84
percent, and processed more than 138,000 FOIA requests in the past year — the
most of any federal agency — and substantially reduced the amount of time it
takes to process FOIA requests, from 240 days to 95.”

When Issa took over control of the committee in January of
this year, his first major request for documents was for DHS to turn over
thousands of copies of records and emails between agency officials. But Issa
was not satisfied with DHS’s response, and last month he subpoenaed two of the
department’s career employees, forcing them to give transcribed interviews
before the committee.

DHS officials have repeatedly stated their willingness to
cooperate with his requests, pointing to the thousands of documents the
department has turned over to the committee so far and the more than 20 staff
members — 15 lawyers and at least six others — who are dedicated to fulfilling
his requests.

Issa’s inquiries about the role that political officers at
DHS play in the FOIA process stems from a report last July by The Associated
Press. The report found that top DHS officials had instructed career employees
to turn over sensitive FOIA requests to Obama’s political advisers
before releasing them to the person who had requested them.

One month later, Issa and Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, the
ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, requested that the
inspectors general from nearly 30 agencies investigate what limitations, if
any, FOIA offices in the various departments were placing on the
information requests.

On Wednesday, the DHS inspector general’s report was obtained
by The Associated Press, which found that political appointees created delays in
the privacy office’s response time.  

“While the department has a legitimate need to be aware of
media inquiries, we are not persuaded that delaying a FOIA release so that officials
can prepare for expected inquiries is the best public policy,” the report
states. “The problem is that some of these inquiries unnecessarily delayed the
final issuance of some FOIA responses.”