Monday, March 28, 2011

DHS called FOIA vetting 'bananas'

DHS called FOIA vetting 'bananas'
By: Jennifer Epstein and MJ Lee
March 28, 2011 07:05 AM EDT
Ahead of a congressional hearing this week on whether senior political appointees at the Department of Homeland Security have blocked the release of some documents requested under the Freedom of Information Act, a series of newly uncensored emails indicates that some staffers complained for months of internal “meddling” by Obama-appointed officials.

Obtained by The Associated Press, the emails describe “crazy” and “bananas!” political reviews of document requests and “constant stonewalling” as files went to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano’s political staff as part of the pre-release vetting process.

President Barack Obama has said that federal workers should “act promptly and in a spirit of cooperation” to fulfill FOIA requests, and Attorney General Eric Holder has stressed that “unnecessary bureaucratic hurdles have no place in the new era of open government.” But critics say the administration has been bogged down by political interests in fulfilling document requests from journalists, watchdog groups and ordinary citizens.

“Redaction decisions have always been made by FOIA professionals and career legal staff,” Homeland Security spokeswoman Amy Kudwa said in an statement to POLITICO.

In one recent instance cited by the AP, immigration rights advocates had asked the department for e-mails that political appointees had sent to U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement about a controversial program. The internal search uncovered “embarrassing, crude exchanges” that were revealed not by the senders of those emails but by the recipients.

“Apparently, these embarrassing exchanges didn’t get turned over when the (political) front office conducted its search but they did when the ICE employees copied on these exchanges coughed up the responsive records,” the FOIA unit’s associate director, William Holzerland, wrote in January, the AP said.

Kudwa said that “no responsive documents were withheld” by the department’s political office. The Privacy Office, she added, never requested that the political appointees search for responsive documents on the ICE issue.

The department’s chief privacy officer, Mary Ellen Callahan, herself a political appointee, warned in emails that the department could be sued over the delays sparked by the political reviews. “This level of attention is CRAZY,” she wrote to her deputy in late 2009, musing that she hoped someone would submit a FOIA request on the process itself, the AP reported. Days later, the AP filed a FOIA request for documents related to political vetting and received close to 1,000 pages of censored emails last summer.

“When (the chief information officer) pulled off the emails for these individuals, the page count is much higher, indicating that [Napolitano’s deputy chief of staff Amy Shlossman] and [chief of staff Noah Kroloff] possibly did not retrieve all the responsive emails or opted not to produce all responsive emails,” Catherine Papoi, then a deputy, wrote in May to Callahan. “I think we have an obligation to compare the hard copy emails to those pulled by the CIO from the individuals’ email accounts to determine why the discrepancy.”

The department contends that the discrepancies had to do with the formatting of the emails, and that all the content is identical.

The Freedom of Information Act requires that the government release information to the public unless it is deemed a threat to national security.

Reports at the time prompted an investigation by the department’s inspector general and an examination by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), who is now the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

Callahan and Ivan Fong, the department’s general counsel, are set to testify before the committee on Thursday.
© 2011 Capitol News Company, LLC

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