In the wake of the email scandal that Hillary Clinton went through, the White House is taking steps to ensure that Obama never has to go through a similar scandal. By releasing all non-classified emails, ramping up transparency, and going above and beyond to operate within the law? No. Unfortunately, the White House is taking the opposite road by trying to overturn the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) regulations that currently hold sway on its Office of Administration:
The White House is removing a federal regulation that subjects its Office of Administration to the Freedom of Information Act, making official a policy under Presidents Bush and Obama to reject requests for records to that office.
The White House said the cleanup of FOIA regulations is consistent with court rulings that hold that the office is not subject to the transparency law. The office handles, among other things, White House record-keeping duties like the archiving of e-mails. . . .
“You have a president who comes in and says, I’m committed to transparency and agencies should make discretionary disclosures whenever possible, but he’s not applying that to his own White House,” [Anne] Weismann [of the liberal Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington] said.
Yes, but when has Obama ever believed that the rules apply to him? He is almost incapable of holding himself and his administration to the same standards he to which he holds others. Just think about his criticisms of the Bush White House. Nearly every single one of them could apply quite nicely to his own tenure as President. This one’s a real doozy:
I taught constitutional law for ten years. I take the Constitution very seriously. The biggest problems that we’re facing right now have to do with George Bush trying to bring more and more power into the executive branch and not go through Congress at all, and that’s what I intend to reverse when I’m President of the United States of America.
Right. Or how about this one:
The problem is, is that the way Bush has done it over the last eight years is to take out a credit card from the Bank of China in the name of our children, driving up our national debt from $5 trillion for the first 42 presidents – #43 added $4 trillion by his lonesome, so that we now have over $9 trillion of debt that we are going to have to pay back — $30,000 for every man, woman and child. That’s irresponsible. It’s unpatriotic.
Town Hall runs these statements of absolute hypocrisy as “pure gold.” They abound. Pretty much in every area where Obama has been critical of the Bush administration, he has been even worse in the exact same vein. This overturning of FOIA regulations is just another in a long line of hypocrisies. It beggars belief that he doesn’t see it. But what can you say? The guy’s a fanatic.