Wednesday, May 20, 2009

White House Office of Administration not subject to FOIA

The best news story I could find, in the Philadelphia Inquirer, here about the Appeals Court in the D.C. Circuit ruling that the White House Office of Administration is not subject to FOIA requests, means that White House e-mails from the Bush administration are not required to be made public. (what a nasty sentence I made! sorry)

Here is a link to the opinion from the court, in the case, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington v. Office of Administration. I had never been to the CREW website before, and it's a good one. It is full of helpful links and documents. They twitter, so you can follow them and keep up with their activities if you are interested in their projects. Twitter is excellent for this, by the way. I am following the Massachusetts Attorney General's office, and this is a super way to get early news of actions with links to their blog for more details. A very good way to get the word out.

The CREW link to their documents and reports on their project on the missing White House e-mails is here, and contains very interesting documents. There are GAO reports with details on the mail system malfunctions and losses. CNN and other news reports, letters and memos and some redacted e-mails (remember Jack Abramoff?) are there. It does not seem to include the pleadings from the case. And there is not an index or table of contents. They scanned all these documents and separated them with Appendix letters and that's all. It's a bit daunting to scroll through. Still, it's a rich resource.

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