Tag: transparency

White House Abruptly Cuts Off Live Feed After Biden Says He Wants To Take Audience Questions

The White House abruptly cut off the live feed feed for an event President Joe Biden was hosting with the House Democratic Caucus after the commander-in-chief appeared to venture off-script by saying he would be willing to answer questions from the audience.

Biden appeared with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and other members of the Democratic Party during the live event, and spoke about his administration’s ongoing obsession with COVID-19 and the steps purportedly taken to halt its spread.

“I’d be happy to take questions if that’s what I’m supposed to do, Nance,” Biden said to Pelosi. “Whatever you want me to do.”

Within moments, the feed cut to a blue screen, and President Biden was no longer visible. A “Thank You For Joining” message informed viewers that the event was now over.

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Blackout: White House curbs press, public access as Biden struggles with public demands of job

Throughout his presidential campaign and continuing since taking the White House, Joe Biden has promised a transparent approach to press and public relations. Yet in recent weeks, his administration has closed off — at least for now — several key avenues via which the press and public have for years gained a modicum of transparency, accessibility and accountability from the White House. 

These moves to curb press and public access come as President Joe Biden himself has at times appeared to be struggling with the public demands of his job. 

Notably, the White House has said that while it will divulge records of individuals who physically visit the White House, it will not be sharing virtual visitor logs. The Biden administration has relied heavily on virtual meetings out of concerns that COVID-19 might spread in face-to-face gatherings. 

An unnamed White House official told Politico this week that the administration’s refusal to release virtual meeting logs was in line with “the same way that previous administrations didn’t release phone logs.”

Meanwhile, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki this week acerbically dismissed a reporter’s query into the administration’s lack of transparency on the issue. 

“[Biden is] meeting with members of the Senate virtually today,” she said. “There, I’ve released it for you. What else would you like to know?”

The White House has also shut down its comment line by which American citizens can call in to leave comments for the executive branch. A recording claims that the comment office is “temporarily closed” and urges callers to visit the White House’s contact page instead.

The Biden administration has also removed the popular “We the People” petitioning platform originally started by President Barack Obama and continued through the Trump administration. As late as Jan. 18 of this year, the program was still active, yet now any attempt to reach the older URL simply reroutes users to the White House’s main page. 

Gone, also, are White House tours, which the administration claims have been “suspended until further notice.” As late as mid-December, the Trump administration was still encouraging Americans to schedule tours through their congressional representatives. 

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LOOPHOLE ALLOWS BIDEN NOMINEES TO AVOID DISCLOSURES. WILL THEY USE IT?

“DONALD TRUMP HAS presided over the most corrupt administration in modern history,” Joe Biden’s website declared as he ran for president. By contrast, the site said, a Biden administration would “make sure that the principles of equality, transparency, and public — not private — interest drive all government decisions.”

It would be difficult for any incoming administration to match Trump for opacity and self-dealing. But an obscure exemption for executive branch officials from disclosing previous clients may generate an interesting test case for Biden’s commitment to full transparency.

The question is partly whether any Biden nominees will use this exemption themselves to conceal their recent sources of income. Perhaps more important is the question of whether the Biden administration will take steps to eliminate the exemption, thereby foreclosing its abuse by future presidents, Trumpian or otherwise.

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Why Are Political Journalists More Scared of Revealing Their Votes Than Baseball Writers?

Look, we know newspapers are going to overwhelmingly endorse Joe Biden. When political donations originating from employees of media organizations are eventually tallied up, we know they will tilt massively Democrat. Most people who are cognizant of the profession’s recent turn toward “moral clarity” over unattainable objectivity understand that that means those with non-lefty politics will be subjected to harsher adjectives.

And yet the very same media commentators who have long decried the so-called “view from nowhere” are absent in this battle for more journalistic transparency.

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State sanctioned secrecy: NSA’s criminality shield

Enacted at the height of the Cold War, the NSA Act gives the agency radically sweeping powers to withhold any information from public disclosure. Specifically, Section 6 of the Act states “…nothing in this Act or any other law…shall be construed to require the disclosure of the organization or any function of the National Security Agency, or any information with respect to the activities thereof, or of the names, titles, salaries, or number of the persons employed by such agency.”

NSA has used that blanket authority to try to keep secret details about its lethal 9/11 intelligence failure. A Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit I brought on behalf of the Cato Institute against the Defense Department (NSA’s parent organization) in January 2017 has, after over three-and-a-half years in federal court, partially punctured NSA’s veil of secrecy over the cancelled TRAILBLAZER and THINTHREAD digital network exploitation (DNE) programs.

In brief, during the five-year period leading up to the 9/11 attacks, a bureaucratic war raged inside of NSA over the best way to handle the exploding volume of digital communications the agency was trying to keep up with. On one side was a group of veteran NSA cryptographers, mathematicians and computer scientists who developed a cheap, extremely effective, and Constitutionally compliant in-house DNE system codenamed THINTHREAD. On the other side was then-NSA Director Michael Hayden, who favored an unproven, external, contractor developed DNE system called TRAILBLAZER. When then-GOP House Intelligence Committee staffer Diane Roark got the THINTHREAD team development money and language in the FY 2002 Intelligence Authorization bill directing wider deployment of the cheaper, off-the-shelf THINTHREAD system, Hayden refused to deploy it as directed — even though THINTHREAD, still in prototype development, was already producing intelligence NSA couldn’t get from any of its other existing systems.

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The Pentagon has made more UFO revelations, but Canada’s had a public UFO database for decades

Earlier this year, the Pentagon confirmed that Tom Delonge had actually leaked some legit UFO videos; and just last week, The New York Times buried even more UFO revelations on the 17th page of the print edition.

It’s definitely weird that the former lead singer of Blink-182 emerged from a paranoid painkiller addiction to become a legitimate UFOlogist, in communication with John Podesta and Hillary Clinton. It’s even weirder that his colleagues in the To The Stars Academy of Arts and Sciences include a former Defense Department employee who may be lying about his involvement with the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program; the former head of the CIA’s “men who stare at goats” program, who also claimed to scientifically “confirm” that Russian magician Uri Geller had actual psychokinetic abilities, even though Geller himself admitted it was a trick; and a scion of the Gulf Oil fortune who also worked for the DOD and involved in a UFO interest group with the co-author of the NYT articles about the Pentagon’s UFO program. Or that TTA purchased supposedly “alien” metals from the billionaire owner of Budget Suites for America.

But what’s even more ridiculous is that the Canadian government has had most of their UFO information easily available for decades. The info they have is no more damning or exciting than that blurry Pentagon footage of a pill-shaped aerial vehicle that’s probably just an unmanned drone or satellite. But the truth, as they say, is out there, nonetheless.

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