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Tag: transparency
Still Waiting For Newspaper Editorials Demanding The Trump Foundation Be Shut Down

Still Waiting For Newspaper Editorials Demanding The Trump Foundation Be Shut Down

Published with permission from Media Matters for America.

Adding to a cavalcade of campaign condemnations, a string of major newspaper editorial boards in recent weeks stepped forward to announce that, in the name of avoiding even the appearance of a conflict of interest, Bill and Hillary Clinton needed to shut down their successful Clinton Foundation.

Conceding that recent news reports hadn’t proven any actual wrongdoing or lawbreaking with the foundation and its connection the State Department when Clinton was secretary of state, editorials from Washington Post, Boston Globe, and USA Today, among others, were nonetheless adamant: Shut it down.

Columnists at Slate, New York and The Wall Street Journal also jumped in, as did an array of TV talkers anxious to add their voices to the media choir demanding a global charity be shut down because the optics didn’t look quite right. And several outlets insisted that waiting until after the election for foundation action wasn’t “good enough.”

Everyone, it seemed, was in heated agreement.

  • “Even if they’ve done nothing illegal, the foundation will always look too much like a conflict of interest for comfort.” (Boston Globe)
  • “[T]he only way to eliminate the odor surrounding the foundation is to wind it down and put it in mothballs.”  (USA Today)
  • “Impressions such as these are corrosive to national institutions.” (Washington Post)

On and on the editorials went, patiently explaining to Clinton what she needed to do to eliminate budding concerns within the Beltway press; how she had to shutter her landmark charity in order to please the optics police.

Reading the proclamations, it was clear to readers that even the appearance of impropriety when it comes to politicians and charitable foundations must be met with swift, pro-active and even drastic action.

So what explains the deafening editorial board silence about the Donald J. Trump Foundation in the wake of the shocking news report that in 2013 it sent an illegal $25,000 donation to a political group supporting Florida’s attorney general, Pam Bondi? At a time, her office was considering opening a fraud investigation into Trump University and widespread allegations the company had cheated students. After the group supporting Bondi received the large Trump check, which she reportedly personally solicited, her office announced it wasn’t going to investigate Trump University.

Where’s the collective demand that the Trump Foundation be shut down because of conflicts?

Not only does the payoff reek of a quid pro quo arrangement, but the generous Foundation donation was also against the law because as a registered non-profit organization, the Trump Foundation isn’t allowed to make political contributions. It appears the Foundation may have taken steps to cover up the donation by by listing the recipient of the funds as a Kansas-based charity in tax forms, according to the Washington Post report. After the $25,000 check was brought to light earlier this year, Trump’s organization paid a $2,500 fine to the IRS.

Given the hyper attention paid to the Clinton Foundation, and the relentless media search for wrongdoing, the Trump revelations are astounding: They seem to represent precisely the type of naked misdeed the press has been trying to uncover with regards to Clinton. But instead, the foundation’s wrongdoing is attached to the Republican nominee and the campaign press reaction has been muted, to say the least.

On the Sunday morning talk shows this week, the story was occasionally referenced by guests, but CBS’s Face The Nation host John Dickerson was the only host to bring up the Trump/Bondi controversy.

Meanwhile, according to a search of CNN transcripts via Nexis, “Trump Foundation” was mentioned in one on-air report on the all-news channel between Monday, August 29, through Monday, September 5. By contrast, “Clinton Foundation” was mentioned in dozens of CNN reports during that same time period.

Keep in mind, the constant media churning about Clinton “optics” revolve around a global charity that represents a textbook example of how to build a modern-day foundation for giving. “If Hillary Clinton wasn’t running for president, the Clinton Foundation would be seen as one of the great humanitarian charities of our generation,” Daniel Borochoff of Charity Watch recently told CNN. (The foundation receives exceptional marks from watchdog organizations.)

The Clinton Foundation’s sterling reputation has now been tarnished, in part because the press has decided to go all in with the GOP’s smear campaign against the charity. It’s decided to overhype trivial revelations about Foundation contacts and meetings that took place years ago.

But when the Trump Foundation is found to have illegally donated to a state attorney general who was contemplating fraud charges against a Trump company? Suddenly the referees on newspaper editorial boards fall silent.

Photo: Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump stands on stage during a campaign town hall meeting in Virginia Beach, Virginia, U.S., September 6, 2016.  REUTERS/Mike Segar

Report: Obama Administration Worse Than Ever On Freedom Of Information Requests

Report: Obama Administration Worse Than Ever On Freedom Of Information Requests

By Arit John, Bloomberg News (TNS)

The Obama administration continued its less than stellar transparency record in 2014, breaking the previous year’s record for denying and censoring requests under the Freedom of Information Act, according to a new analysis of the administration’s FOIA data by the Associated Press.

The report comes in the midst of Sunshine Week, which raises awareness of open government issues like compliance with the Freedom of Information Act. The White House has already faced some criticism this week for formalizing a rule from the Bush administration that exempts the White House’s Office of Administration from FOIA requests.

According to the AP, the government “took longer to turn over files when it provided any, said more regularly that it couldn’t find documents, and refused a record number of times to turn over files quickly that might be especially newsworthy.” A third of the government’s decisions to withhold documents violated the Freedom of Information Act, the news organization said.

This is the second report this week to shine a light on the government’s transparency under FOIA. A Tuesday report from the Center for Effective Government, an open government advocacy group, analyzed 15 major agencies and found that most received unsatisfactory marks when it comes to processing requests, maintaining its disclosure rules, and updating its FOIA websites.

The State Department, currently in the news over former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s exclusive use of a private e-mail account, scored significantly worse than any other agency. It only processed 23 percent of all requests and took, on average, 540 days to fill simple FOIA requests; the law dictates that it should take 20 days.

The Obama administration — often mocked for its promise that it would be the most transparent administration in history — said that in 91 percent of cases the government released all or part of the documents requested. “We actually do have a lot to brag about when it comes to our responsiveness to Freedom of Information Act requests,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest said.

But the AP said the 91 percent figure doesn’t include instances where the document was lost, when the requester couldn’t or wouldn’t pay for copies, or when the document request was “determined to be improper under the law,” and is lower than any other year Obama has been in office.

Photo: President Barack Obama signs the Department of Homeland Security funding bill in the Oval Office of the White House on Wednesday, March 4, 2015, in Washington, D.C. (Olivier Douliery/Abaca Press/TNS)

Technology Does Not Guarantee Transparency

Technology Does Not Guarantee Transparency

In theory, the changeover from paper to email should make government more transparent. The cost of archiving documents should be lower, because data can be housed on relatively small hard drives rather than in spacious warehouses. Likewise, the time expense of retrieving that data should be reduced, because it can be obtained through a few keystrokes rather than a tedious search of file cabinets.

Consequently, open records requests should be far easier to fulfill, because electronic correspondence and memos are keyword searchable. Yet two New York politicos are showing that the era of Big Data does not necessarily mean the public gets a better view of its government.

The first is Hillary Clinton, the Empire State’s former senator. According to reports this week in The New York Times and Associated Press, Clinton avoided using a government email address as U.S. Secretary of State, instead conducting State Department business through a personal account on her own private server. The Times notes that “the practice protected a significant amount of her correspondence from the eyes of investigators and the public.”

According to one legal expert, Clinton’s move may have run afoul of the spirit — if not the letter — of rules governing federal records.

“It is very difficult to conceive of a scenario — short of nuclear winter — where an agency would be justified in allowing its cabinet-level head officer to solely use a private email communications channel for the conduct of government business,” a former lawyer for the National Archives and Records Administration told the Times.

At least Clinton’s emails may still exist somewhere, and could be made public if she and the State Department choose to release them. The same cannot necessarily be said for emails from the New York state government, thanks to Democratic governor Andrew Cuomo.

Last week, his administration began mass deleting state government emails that are more than 90 days old. It is a data purging policy he first instituted in 2007 as state attorney general, making it harder for the public to know if his office investigated bank fraud in the lead up to the financial crisis of 2008.

In the Cuomo administration’s announcement of the new policy for other branches of state government, the governor’s chief information officer said the objective is “making government work better.” While Cuomo officials have suggested that the purge policy is a technical necessity to consolidate email systems, an official at the Electronic Frontier Foundation said “there’s no technological reason that New York can’t maintain these records indefinitely.”

What’s particularly notable about Cuomo’s move is that it comes amid a sprawling federal probe of corruption in New York state government. Indeed, right now, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Manhattan has said that “we have a number of investigations going on” in Albany.

In light of that, a former Justice Department official in the Clinton administration, Melanie Sloan, told International Business Times: “This is potentially obstruction of justice. The only reason that the government destroys records is so no one can question what it is doing, and no one can unearth information about improper conduct. There’s no reason for New York not to preserve this information.”

The key lesson from both of these stories is that the age-old tricks of subterfuge are still available in the information age. The proponents of secrecy may not have to use clunky document shredders anymore; instead, they can shred more of those documents with a click of a button.

Preserving any kind of open government, therefore, requires continued vigilance and stronger freedom of information laws because new technology alone does not guarantee transparency. Too often it can foster the opposite.

David Sirota is a senior writer at the International Business Times and the best-selling author of the books Hostile Takeover, The Uprising and Back to Our Future.” Email him at ds@davidsirota.com, follow him on Twitter @davidsirota or visit his website at www.davidsirota.com.

Photo: Governor Andrew Cuomo delivers remarks at the start of the Little Neck/Douglaston Memorial Day Parade on Monday, May 26, 2014. (Diana Robinson/Flickr)

Why Is A Huge Trade Deal Being Kept Secret?

Why Is A Huge Trade Deal Being Kept Secret?

The trade rules of the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership between the United States and 11 Asian nations would cover nearly 40 percent of the world economy — but don’t ask what they are. Access to the text of the proposed deal is highly restricted.

Nevertheless, at last month’s World Economic Forum in Switzerland, U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman defended the Obama administration from intensifying criticism of its refusal to release the full text of the proposed trade pact.

“We can always do better on transparency,” he said, but added that “there is no area of policy where there is closer collaboration between the executive and Congress than trade policy.”

Froman, who said his office has held more than 1,600 briefings with lawmakers over the TPP, asserted that his office also has released summaries of proposed provisions.

Yet the actual text of the agreement remains under lock and key. That represents a significant break from the Bush administration, which in 2001 published the text of a proposed multinational trade agreement with Latin American nations.

“It is incomprehensible to me that leaders of major corporate interests who stand to gain enormous financial benefits from this agreement are actively involved in the writing of the TPP, while at the same time, the elected officials of this country, representing the American people, have little or no knowledge of what’s in it,” wrote U.S. senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) in a letter to Froman last month.

Sanders’ office confirms that congressional lawmakers are permitted to view the text of the agreement only in the Trade Representative’s office, without their own staff members or experts present. They are not allowed to take copies of the agreement back to Capitol Hill for deeper, independent evaluation.

Despite those restrictions, specific details of the agreement’s text have surfaced from unauthorized leaks — some of which appear to contradict the Obama administration’s promises.

Froman, for instance, said in Switzerland that “none of [the trade participants] want to lower our health, safety or environmental standards,” yet one of the leaks showed the U.S. proposing to empower corporations to attempt to overturn domestic regulations, while critics say another leaked provision would help the pharmaceutical industry inflate the price of medicines in poor countries.

Froman and Roberto Carvalho de Azevedo, the director-general of the World Trade Organization, were asked at the World Economic Forum why the Obama administration is concealing the TPP from the public at the same time the European Union has just published the full text of a separate proposed trade agreement with the United States. If, as the Obama administration has argued, some confidentiality is necessary for frank negotiations, was the EU wrong to publish its full proposal?

Froman suggested that nations have varying definitions of transparency.

“It is very important that as we pursue these trade negotiations we do so in a way that takes into account input from the public, from our wide range of stakeholders, our political processes — in our case, Congress — we each have different ways we engage in that process,” he said.

Azevedo said: “Honestly, this is something that the participants have to solve — the degree of openness and the degree of transparency.” Negotiations require a degree of balance between transparency and secrecy, he said, “otherwise they don’t move.”

That may be true, but the question is why? Why don’t trade deals advance when they are made public?

Perhaps because when citizens learn the details of such trade agreements, they don’t like them — and they end up putting pressure on their leaders to back off.

Trade officials seem to think that’s a bad thing. But transparency and subsequent grassroots pressure is better than secretly negotiating a trade deal that ends up defying public will.

David Sirota is a senior writer at the International Business Times and the best-selling author of the books Hostile Takeover, The Uprising and Back to Our Future. Email him at ds@davidsirota.com, follow him on Twitter @davidsirota or visit his website at www.davidsirota.com.

Photo: Michael Froman on Day 4 of the WTO’s Ministerial Conference, Bali, December 3, 2013. (World Trade Organization/Flickr)