Tag: transparency

Stop Protecting Presidents from History

The media continues to treat former President Barack Obama as a champion of transparency, but his presidential library is looking like a huge bait-and-switch. Obama raised hundreds of millions for a grandiose library in south Chicago – except that it was revealed two years ago that it wouldn’t actually be a library. At the end of the Obama administration, 30 million pages of documents from his presidency were shipped to a former retail store near Chicago. Come to find out, the Obama Foundation, a private nonprofit organization, will control the official records of his time in office, rather than the National Archives and Records Administration, which administers all other presidential libraries. Rather than opening the files to the public and researchers, the Obama Foundation will eventually digitize the records. This could result in even worse delays than George W. Bush sought to finagle. Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Garrow warned, “The absence of a true Obama presidential library will have the effect of discouraging serious and potentially critical research into the Obama presidency.”

There are plenty of reasons to expect excessive secrecy from both Trump and from Biden, who kept his Senate records locked up during his presidential run. In 2011, Biden was treated like a civic saint when he donated 1,875 boxes of documents from his U.S. Senate career to the University of Delaware. The National Endowment for Humanities gave a grant to help curate the collection, and the deal between Biden and the library was that the documents would remain sealed until “two years after Biden retires from public office.” Biden retired as Vice President in January 2017. Instead of releasing the information to the public, the library announced just before Biden launched his presidential campaign that secrecy would continue until two years after Biden “retires from public life.” Biden in 2019 justified keeping all his Senate records locked up during the campaign because “the idea that they would all be made public in the fact while I was running for public office, they could be really taken out of context.” It is unknown whether Biden’s Senate records contained any bombshells as explosive as his son Hunter’s laptop (which the media raced to defuse before Election Day).

Prerogatives for perpetual presidential secrecy are more akin to royalty than to a republic. Presidential libraries, which cost taxpayers $100 million a year, become lavish taxpayer-funded mausoleums where public records are mostly buried in perpetuity. As New York University history professor Jonathan Zimmerman wrote in 2015, “Why should each president get his own library? Multiple libraries are wasteful… And they’re undemocratic, because they allow our presidents – not the people who elected them – to define their legacies.” Zimmerman recommended putting all presidential records in a single library.

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Biden Administration Erased Afghan Weapons Reports From Federal Websites

The War in Afghanistan has always been a black box, but the Biden administration just made matters worse.

According to an admission obtained from the State Department, Biden officials recently directed federal agencies to scrub their websites of official reports detailing the $82.9 billion in military equipment and training provided to the Afghan security forces since 2001.

The scrubbed audits and reports included detailed accounting of what the U.S. had provided to Afghan forces, down to the number of night vision devices, hand grenades, Black Hawk helicopters, and armored vehicles.

Reports further quantified 208 aircraft and helicopters; 75,000 war vehicles – including 22 Humvees, 50,000 tactical vehicles and nearly 1,000 mine resistant vehicles; and 600,000 weapons – including 350,000 M4 and M16 rifles, 60,000 machine guns, and 25,000 grenade launchers.

The State Department admitted to removing the reports but justified the move as a way to protect Afghan allies. According to a spokesperson:

“The safety of our Afghan contacts is of utmost importance to us. The State Department advised other federal agencies of to [sic] review their web properties for content that highlights cooperation/participation between an Afghan citizen and the USG or a USG partner and remove from public view if it poses a security risk.”

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So much for ‘restoring transparency and trust’! Joe Biden REFUSES to disclose who’s visited his Delaware homes during his 17 trips back since becoming president despite vowing to be more open about guests than Donald Trump

Joe Biden will not disclose who has visited him at his Delaware residences in the 17 trips he has taken home since becoming president – despite promising to ‘restore transparency and trust’ to the White House.  

President Biden’s Press Secretary Jen Psaki made the announcement at a press conference Wednesday.

She told reporters:  ‘I can confirm we are not going to be providing information about the comings and goings of the president’s grandchildren or people visiting him in Delaware,’ Psaki told the New York Post on Biden’s stance on releasing visitor logs. 

The publication also flagged visitors who could trigger potential conflicts of interests – including Biden’s former drug abuser son Hunter, who is now on the cusp of becoming a successful artist. He plans to sell some of his works to anonymous buyers for up to $500,000, sparking fears people could buy the works to try and lobby the president. But Psaki refused to be drawn.  

She did so despite the administration has recently boasting of its efforts to ‘restore transparency and trust in government,’ a commitment that includes the release of several different White House visitor logs.

However, critics of the administration and transparency advocates are calling on the president to release visitor logs from his residences alongside those from the White House. They say similar rules should apply to all the president’s residences, both official and unofficial, given the power and influence he holds while in office.

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‘Why do you need to have that information?’ White House REFUSES to reveal number of ‘breakthrough cases’ in Covid-infected staff

Psaki revealed earlier this week that there had been positive Covid-19 cases in the White House that have not been disclosed.

During Friday’s press conference, she focused mainly on pushing vaccinations to the unvaccinated, as she has on previous occasions. She claimed unvaccinated Americans posed a threat to those who were vaccinated, despite the latter being protected from the virus.

Regardless of the efforts of Psaki and the rest of Joe Biden’s administration, the number of vaccinations administered continues to fall with each update, and interest in getting vaccinated remains significantly low for those who have avoided inoculation thus far.

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“Fraudits Have No Place in Colorado” – Democrat Colorado Secretary of State Issues Emergency Rules Prohibiting Election Audits

Democrat Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold on Thursday announced her office issued emergency rules prohibiting election audits.

“My office just issued rules prohibiting sham election audits in the State of Colorado. We will not risk the state’s election security nor perpetuate The Big Lie. Fraudits have no place in Colorado,” Griswold announced, taking a swipe at the Arizona audit.

In Thursday’s press release, Griswold boasted that Colorado’s elections are considered the “safest in the nation.”

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Hawley-Braun Proposed Legislation Would Declassify Intelligence Related to Wuhan Lab, Potentially Shedding Light on Fauci’s Role in Grant-Based Research

There may finally be movement on getting to the bottom of exactly what role the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) — which has reportedly received $600,000 in U.S. tax dollars via grant money awarded by a unit of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) via the EcoHealth Alliance to study coronaviruses in bats — played in the COVID-19 pandemic.

If Republican Sens. Josh Hawley of Missouri and Mike Braun of Indiana are successful in a new legislative proposal called the COVID-19 Origin Act of 2021, President Joe Biden will be directed to declassify American intelligence already collected examining those links — and shed light on the role of the NIH unit that approved the grant to the WIV, Dr. Anthony Fauci’s National Institutes of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, which sidestepped official review of the grant by a federal oversight board, according to the Daily Caller News Foundation.

According to the proposal, the goal is to “(A) identify the origin of COVID–19 as expeditiously as possible, and (B) use that information to take all appropriate measures to prevent a similar pandemic from occurring again.”

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Biden Administration Officials Urged Republican Senators to Delete Pictures of Border Visit

In a recent appearance on Fox News’s “Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo”, Wyoming Senator John Barrasso revealed that Biden administration officials begged a group of senators who were present at the Southern Border to “delete the pictures.”

Barrasso recounted that he and 18 other Republican senators went down to the border at the end of March to get an idea of the immigration crisis taking place down there. Upon arriving at the border, the senators were instructed “to delete the pictures,” but none ended up doing so.

“We were told to delete the pictures. No one did. You’ve seen the video coming out of all of these kids crammed together under the foil blankets, huddling together,” Barrasso said in the interview.

Shakhzod Yuldoshboev of the Daily Caller noted that Barrasso was concerned about the conditions of the unaccompanied minors who were illegally smuggled into the US were being kept in. “They are crammed in like sardines,” Barrasso observed on the program.

“This is what the Biden administration is trying to hide from the American public. Which is why we took video, and the Biden administration tried to stop us,” he continued. 

Yuldoshboev also highlighted that Barrasso accused the Biden administration of censoring coverage of the border crisis in a tweet late last month.

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