The Trump White House nondisclosure agreements that are back in the news thanks to Omarosa Manigault Newman open up big questions about the Trump administration’s obsession with secrecy and obsessive avoidance of accountability. That goes beyond questions of collusion with Russia or whether “executive time” is really just Donald Trump tweeting from the toilet or wandering around in a bathrobe ranting, as Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington’s Noah Bookbinder explains to Greg Sargent.
Nondisclosure agreements and other limits on what we know aren’t just keeping us from knowing about Trump’s toilet Twitter habits, they’re potentially hiding from the public how decisions are being made and whose voices are heard in those decisions:
“Transparency in government is premised on understanding why decisions are made and what the process is,” Bookbinder told me. “If you start adding additional non-public restrictions, it takes you further in the direction of a government that is not accountable, and is being operated on principles that people don’t know about.” [...]
“If influence is being applied from outside interests, that ought to be something that the public knows about and that employees can talk about,” Bookbinder said, adding that other matters that might remain hidden are cases in which “decisions aren’t made in a responsible way.”
And when you’re talking about an administration filled with people who—oops!—remembered months after the fact that they did talk to the Russian ambassador after all, or who are gutting consumer and environmental protections after asking lobbyists for favors, or a host of other Trump administration greatest hits, the public needs to know what’s going on.