Saturday night foil:
The most excellent TPM points us to this fascinating interview with Daniel Metcalfe, a senior attorney at Justice who retired in January, and served most recently as director of the Office of Information and Privacy. Read the whole thing; the analysis of “consensus” is crying out to be connected with working toward the Fuhrer. However, this question and answer, all the way down at the end of the interview, really caught my eye:
Q: Did you ever feel you were pressured in the Bush administration (or any previous one) to perform your FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] work to serve the administration’s political agenda?
And Metcalfe’s answer:
Basically, “no.” However:
It is not undue “pressure” to expect that career professionals will do their best to craft and implement such policies as strongly as an administration desires. Against this backdrop, I can say that, at least during my quarter-century of leading governmentwide FOIA policy, nothing quite so blatantly nefarious occurred. …
[A] further caveat [is] necessary here, however: …
Candor compels me to acknowledge that there in fact was a situation in which, rather than being asked to do something for purposes of a political agenda, I surely was asked to refrain from doing something quite ordinary for a reason that I later learned (and earlier had surmised) was indeed very much a “political” type of agenda. That situation does stand apart in my government experience, but I will refrain from saying anything more about it here, other than that it did occur during the early months of 2005.
Hmmm…. FOIA requests in early 2005. Readers, does that ring a bell?
Front page
Hmm. Proving a negative? Hard
Of course Metcalf’s comment is prima facie horseshit: the whole point of FOIA requests is to fucking release information, and if you “refrain from releasing” it I’d say that consitutes “doing something.” In fact the more I think about it the more convoluted, mealy-mouthed and weasely this whole sentence reads.
However back to the question of what it might have been (not been): first thing that jumped into my head was a request from Tom Curley at the AP. Seems like they had a big project they were working on a few years ago, concerning which he complained in public several times about difficulties with an FOIA request that was being ignored. (I have no recollection what department it was from, if he ever said). They did write it up and it never made much of a splash but I can’t for the life of me remember what it was about.
If Meatcalf’s tellin’ the cross-my-heart truth about the date the answer is “beats the hell outta me.” If on the other hand he “misspoke” by about a year the most logical thing for it to have been was the Bush/TANG records case. Neh?
Hmm. Case might be in Curley's
recent testimony to a Judiciary Committee hearing on a proposed rewrite of the FOIA law:
Still looking. Problem is to find (1)an egregious case which was (2) a refused FOIA request (3) with date attached (4) which is 2005. I’d add “of political significance which would be embarassing to the Bush Administration” but since with them everything is political and nothing is embarassing (just something they have temporarily failed to get away with) I will be damned if I can think of a quantifiable search term to cover the matter. :)
Hmm
There’s the ACLU’s quest to get the documents about Gitmo interrogation methods, and then the Denver cops spying on vegans and peace groups. But neither of those seem “ordinary”, really…
Hey, what’s this?
Still, the gov’t eventually relented in these cases…
…as far as we know. He never quite said that he completely denied a request, did he? That’s about all I feel like digging for on Lexis, though.
Xan, did you read the whole article?
I thought it was fascinating, and there are lot of posts in it to be had. Think of it as a window into the mind of a very high-level career official. This guy is a thousand times better than the Goodlings of this world.
No authoritarians were tortured in the writing of this post.
(Hangs head in shame)
Didn’t even click on it. Will save for future reference as soon as I get some shit out of the way &ct. :)
Forgot to say
My reading was that Metcalfe was trying to give somebody a really, really broad hint. Check it out, Xan, it’s really excellent.
No authoritarians were tortured in the writing of this post.
This one’s not easy.
This one’s not easy. There are a crap-load of FOIA requests and denials. The trouble is that I don’t know if it was just processed in early 2005 or just denied then.
Some of the stuff that I did find had to do with internet privacy and governmental snooping of web browsers. There was the stuff about Jeff Gannon then too. Also, there was a request that was turned down for release of videos from private citizens regarding the 9/11 pentagon disaster. And — there were requests regarding the number of deaths of soldiers and civilians and requests regarding biological weapons being developed.
Again — there’s a lot of stuff out there and his hint was pretty broad. Can anybody else make anything out of this?
Hmm.
Presuming that the request was denied in early 2005 but may have been filed earlier, and that it was a Justice Department request (ruling out CDC, SEC, Commerce, and every other agency) might narrow it down some. I see interesting candidates here, here, here, and here.
In addition to Jeff Gannon.
—Matt
Does the name "Jeff Gannon" ring a bell?
That was my first thought…
Well, going back over Metcalfe's wording...
… “Jeff Gannon” could indeed be said to “stand apart.” But I’m just too relentlessly clean-minded to follow up on that.
No authoritarians were tortured in the writing of this post.