The following article by James Hohmann with Breanne Deppisch was posted on the Washington Post website April 17, 2017:
THE BIG IDEA: Donald Trump appears to have made a cynical calculation that he will not pay a high political price for being the most secretive president since Richard Nixon.
All the leaks about infighting among senior staff and the president’s proclivity for tweeting have created a false sense that the public knows what is happening inside his White House. In fact, the administration has gone to great lengths to conceal pertinent information from the American people.
After dodging questions on the subject for weeks, the administration waited until the afternoon of Good Friday to dump the news that it will not follow former president Barack Obama’s policy of voluntarily disclosing the names of most visitors to the White House complex. The president’s communications director cited “grave national security risks” as a justification, even though Obama had made an exception for national security.
Then on Easter, Trump lashed out at the tens of thousands of protesters who marched in dozens of cities on Saturday to demand that he release his tax returns. As a candidate, the president declined to voluntarily release his tax returns – even though every major party presidential nominee has done so for more than 40 years. Polls consistently showed that most voters wanted to see what was in the returns, and Trump promised he’d share them eventually. But he changed his tune as soon as he won, saying that his victory proved people didn’t care. As he tweeted yesterday, “The election is over!”
Despite constantly ripping Hillary Clinton for being secretive, Trump was consistently less transparentduring the campaign. Besides not releasing his taxes, he declined to provide documentation of the “tens of millions” of dollars he claimed to have donated to charity. Instead of a full medical history, Trump put out a four-paragraph letter that declared he would be “the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.” He also rarely fleshed out any of his promises with specifics, famously telling voters that he had a secret plan to destroy the Islamic State.
Trump seems to feel that the results in November validated this obfuscation, and that takeaway has emboldened him to continue the same approach as much as possible.
TRUMP WAS FOR TRANSPARENCY BEFORE HE WAS AGAINST IT:
— During the 2012 campaign, Republicans actually attacked Obama for not going far enough when it came to disclosure of the visitor logs. Some meetings were kept off the logs, and aides scheduled certain sessions at the Caribou coffee shop across the street from the White House so that they wouldn’t be disclosed. Trump joined this chorus:
Why is @BarackObama spending millions to try and hide his records? He is the least transparent President–ever–and he ran on transparency.
— Back then, as he embraced the birther conspiracy theory to lay the groundwork for a presidential run, the businessman was an often outspoken advocate of transparency. Here are five more examples of him promoting the principle of disclosure, from Twitter alone:
For the sake of transparency, @BarackObama should release all his college applications and transcripts–both from Occidental and Columbia.
If Obama doesn’t accept my offer to be fully transparent, what will he say?
In the spirit of transparency, Obama should immediately release the 9.11 tape of Tyrone Woods pleading for military support in Benghazi.
Since @BarackObama is on such a “transparency” kick–how about releasing Fast & Furious info to Brian Terry’s family?http://bit.ly/NyxxZS
Top Ten Things Obama Has Not Released – Breitbart
As the Obama campaign and the media continue to press Mitt Romney to release more of his tax returns, and to suggest–without a shred of evidence–that he is a
breitbart.com
A lot of undecided and independent voters have had enough with Obama’s lack of transparency. I don’t blame them.
Top White House aides also echoed these talking points. As RNC communications director, Sean Spicer attacked the president for not putting enough information in the visitor logs. “President Obama got elected by promising to be different, to change Washington, and to be open, transparent and accountable,” Spicer wrote in an Aug. 2012 press release. “But it turns out it was all empty rhetoric–nothing but broken promises.”
— Trump’s evolving excuses for withholding his tax returns encapsulate why he is a man who cannot be taken at his word:
- In 2011, the businessman told ABC News he’d release his tax returns as soon as Obama released his birth certificate. Obama did. Trump reneged.
- In 2012, criticizing Mitt Romney for not releasing his returns, Trump said on Fox News that it would be “a positive” and “a great thing” if he put his returns out because it would show “you’ve been successful, and that you’ve made a lot of money.” The former Massachusetts governor eventually relented under pressure.
- In 2014, Trump was unequivocal. “If I decide to run for office, I’ll produce my tax returns, absolutely,” he told an Irish TV station. “And I would love to do that.”
- “At some point I’ll release it,” he said in a 2015 radio interview.
- In early 2016, Trump said he was “working on” putting the returns together and planned to share them soon. Then, after he started winning primaries, he changed his tune. He said he couldn’t put them out because he was being audited by the IRS. But he promised repeatedly, including during an October debate with Clinton, that he’d share his returns just “as soon as the audit is finished.”
— If he hasn’t already, Trump will file this year’s taxes very soon. The audit excuse does not apply. It is literally impossible for this year’s return to already be under scrutiny by the IRS. There are also previous years that are not under audit.
— Now, however, the president acts as if the mere fact he won an election absolves him of every past promise. On Saturday, Trump’s motorcade took a circuitous route back from a golf outing so he would not need to see hundreds of protestors calling for his tax returns. On Sunday, he tweeted this:
I did what was an almost an impossible thing to do for a Republican-easily won the Electoral College! Now Tax Returns are brought up again?
Someone should look into who paid for the small organized rallies yesterday. The election is over!
— “The marches were sponsored by a coalition of 69 organizations,” John Wagner answers. “Many of the protests featured an inflatable chicken, a mascot of sorts for the march, in a bid to mock Trump’s unwillingness to share his returns.”
— It’s not just the taxes and visitor logs, though. There are numerous examples of Trump and his team withholding pertinent information from the public since January:
— Foxes in the hen house: Secret waivers allow lobbyists to advance their former clients’ interests from high perches inside the government without anyone on the outside ever knowing. The lead story in Sunday’s New York Times, produced in conjunction with ProPublica, highlighted how cagey Trump’s White House is being about whether it is even following its own rules. From Eric Lipton, Ben Protess and Andrew Lehren: “President Trump is populating the White House and federal agencies with former lobbyists, lawyers and consultants who in many cases are helping to craft new policies for the same industries in which they recently earned a paycheck. … The potential conflicts are arising across the executive branch. … In at least two cases, the appointments may have already led to violations of the administration’s own ethics rules. But evaluating if and when such violations have occurred has become almost impossible because the Trump administration is secretly issuing waivers to the rules…
- “One such case involves Michael Catanzaro, who serves as the top White House energy adviser. Until late last year, he was working as a lobbyist for major industry clients such as Devon Energy of Oklahoma, an oil and gas company, and Talen Energy of Pennsylvania, a coal-burning electric utility, as they fought Obama-era environmental regulations, including the landmark Clean Power Plan. Now, he is handling some of the same matters on behalf of the federal government.
- “Another case involves Chad Wolf, who spent the past several years lobbying to secure funding for the Transportation Security Administration to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a new carry-on luggage screening device. He is now chief of staff at that agency — at the same time as the device is being tested and evaluated for possible purchase by agency staff…
- “At the Labor Department, two officials joined the agency from the K Street lobbying corridor, leaving behind jobs where they fought some of the Obama administration’s signature labor rules, including a policy requiring financial advisers to act in a client’s best interest when providing retirement advice.
- “In several cases, officials in the Trump administration now hold the exact jobs they targeted as lobbyists or lawyers in the past two years. Trump White House officials had over 300 recent corporate clients and employers, including Apple, the giant hedge fund Citadel and the insurance titan Anthem, according to a Times analysis of financial disclosures. (The White House has released disclosures for only about half of its roughly 180 current senior political employees.) And there are more than 40 former lobbyists in the White House and the broader federal government…
“A White House spokeswoman, Sarah H. Sanders, declined repeated requests by The Times to speak with … the White House lawyer in charge of the ethics policy. Instead, the White House provided a written statement that did not address any of the specific questions about potential violations…” (Read the whole story here.)
— The White House appears to be gagging agencies and instructing professional career staffers to not respond to inquiries from Democratic lawmakers. During the first six years of Bush’s presidency, when they were also in the minority, Democrats say departments would not respond to every letter but for the most part provided documents and answered questions courteously. At Nancy Pelosi’s request, Rep. John Sarbanes (D-Md.) is tracking all the letters that House Democrats are sending to the executive branch. So far, Sarbanes says, more than 100 have received no response. This appears to be part of a bigger effort to prevent factual information from getting out unless it will advance Trump’s agenda to deconstruct the administrative state.
In Sunday’s Post, Darryl Fears reported on two examples of lawmakers being rebuffed by the Trump administration:
Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.) could not get information out of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service about the Endangered Species Act. He was stunned when his chief of staff informed him that a staffer tasked with retrieving some statistics from a congressional liaison office was turned away. Grijalva said he was told that Fish and Wildlife workers couldn’t speak to minority staff unless they were called as a witness at a hearing. “I’ve been on this committee going on my 15th year,” Grijalva said. “This kind of response is unprecedented.” Without the guidance, the Democrats on a Natural Resources subcommittee said they were powerless to refute claims from witnesses called by Republicans to attack the law. (An Interior spokeswoman denied wrongdoing.)
Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.), the ranking member on the Environment and Public Works Committee, says he was told by officials at the General Services Administration that they will now only provide documents when they are requested by Republican chairmen. Carper wanted to know whether the use of public land by a Trump hotel in Washington financially benefited the president. He said GSA officials told him they wouldn’t cooperate. The White House did not respond to Darryl’s requests for comment.
— The administration tried to block Sally Yates from testifying before Congress by asserting executive privilege. The Justice Department sought to stop the former acting attorney general from testifying before the House Intelligence Committee — on the ouster of former national security adviser Michael Flynn for his contacts with the Russian ambassador, among other things — by telling her lawyer that any communications with the White House were protected by attorney-client privilege, according to letters obtained by The Post.
Yates, who was fired in January by Trump for ordering DOJ lawyers not to defend his first immigration ban, played a key part in the investigation surrounding Flynn. She had made clear to government officials that her testimony to the committee would probably contradict some statements that White House officials had made, according to Devlin Barrett and Adam Entous. Before she got her chance to speak, House Intelligence chairman Devin Nunes, who has since stepped aside, canceled the hearing altogether. Spicer denied The Post’s report, claiming that the White House did not seek to have the hearing canceled and did not assert privilege. But her testimony has not been rescheduled.
— There are many smaller examples of the White House trying to control the information flow:
Trump has ditched the protective press pool to go to dinner and golfing, a break with longstanding tradition. Often the White House won’t even acknowledge that the president is golfing when he is at a golf course. When it does, spokesmen refuse to disclose the names of the president’s golf partners. That too is a break with precedent.
Staffers routinely converse with each other on encrypted private messaging apps, which could be in violation of the Presidential Records Act. It means that there will be no copies archived for historical purposes. It also means that if Democrats win control of either chamber of Congress in 2018, and with it subpoena power, crucial material may already be deleted.
— Finally, Trump has taken steps to scale back transparency requirements for companies, as well. Last month, the president signed a bill that killed an Obama-era worker safety rule that required businesses competing for large federal contracts to disclose serious safety and other labor law violations. In February, he repealed a regulation that required energy companies to disclose payments to foreign governments. Trump signed that measure on Valentine’s Day.
View the post here.