EDITORIAL: IRS, State Department balk at transparency

Throughout President Barack Obama’s supposed “most transparent administration in history,” we’ve been reminded time and time again just how hostile the federal government can be to transparency, particularly when partisan political considerations are at play.

Remember Lois Lerner? The former IRS tax exempt organization chief was at the center of the scandal in which the agency was found to have deliberately delayed and denied nonprofit status to conservative political groups, to diminish their influence on the 2012 election. Ms. Lerner’s emails have been requested repeatedly by members of Congress and watchdog groups such as Judicial Watch, which asked for the documents as part of a Freedom of Information Act request two years ago.

The IRS stalled the request, saying the emails had been destroyed when a hard drive crashed. Later, the Treasury Department’s Inspector General for Tax Administration miraculously was able to recover 6,400 emails and deliver them to the IRS. The agency then blew off another court-ordered deadline June 12, however, saying last week that it couldn’t deliver the emails to Judicial Watch because the agency says it has to make sure that none of the emails had been made public previously.

If this sounds ridiculous to you, it’s because it is.

In another case of transparent political maneuvering, Sidney Blumenthal, a longtime confidant of Democratic Party presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton, recently handed over documents subpoenaed by the House committee investigating the 2012 terrorist attack on the U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya. Among the memos and correspondence were documents not provided to the committee by the State Department or the former secretary of state — documents that raise new questions about whether the State Department and Mrs. Clinton fully complied with the panel’s requests.

The emails include information regarding weapons that were circulating in Libya and security in Benghazi in the year and a half before the attack. In the past year, the committee has asked the State Department and Mrs. Clinton several times for emails from her and other department officials discussing “weapons located or found in” Libya and about the nature of the diplomatic mission in Benghazi.

Either the State Department possesses the emails and did not hand them over, or Mrs. Clinton never provided them to the department and subsequently wiped them off her private server, which housed the personal email account she used when she was secretary of state. If the State Department doesn’t have the emails, then we know that Mrs. Clinton did — and that she likely destroyed them.

So, if you’re keeping score at home, the IRS won’t release emails it’s legally required to release because it needs to be sure it hasn’t released them previously, and either the State Department or Hillary Clinton herself withheld information from the House committee investigating Benghazi. There is no deterrent to obstructing and stalling the release of federal records, which has happened in both of these cases.

Republicans control Congress. They can do something about this obstruction. They can be more aggressive in holding accountable federal agencies and individuals who don’t adequately respond to subpoenas, and they can reform the Freedom of Information Act to create a clearer presumption of openness and give more power to the Office for Government Information Services, which acts as an FOIA ombudsman. It won’t stop all the game-playing with records, but it will send a message that government can’t hide the public’s business from the public.