The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) is a key tool that media and the public can use to hold politicians of both parties accountable. If sunlight is the best disinfectant, FOIA is a sunroof, a window into otherwise shadowy bureaucratic crevasses that those in power may prefer to be left unexplored.
Which is why it matters that, as CQ Roll Call reported yesterday, in May of 2018, the Department of Interior quietly formalized a process for handling FOIA requests that brings political appointees into the mix instead of keeping the process in the hands of career staff who are loyal to the constitution and country instead of political patrons.
The change essentially provides the opportunity for politically appointed leadership at DOI to weigh in on what’s released under FOIA. In less charitable terms, the new policy puts a thumb on the scale of what gets released and what doesn’t. And it’s not hard to understand how that plays out.
In February of 2019, that policy was expanded to include former officials--specifically Ryan Zinke.
Western Values Project FOIA’d for documents that involved Zinke’s wife Lola last June, who previous records show was causing headaches for the department. A month after their request, a career DOI official told them they found 96 pages of “potentially responsive materials.” But shortly thereafter, political appointees were informed of the pending release, and Zinke’s communications director Heather Swift disagreed about how much should be released.
Ultimately, the group received only 16 pages of documents. (More is not always better, of course: DOI Secretary Bernhardt recently sent some 66,000 pages to the House Natural Resources Committee, much of which was, per the committee’s Twitter, “a bunch of visual garbage” like code, wingdings and other nonsense. This is representative of “a classic corporate legal trick known as a ‘document dump’ and is meant to obfuscate, delay and hide information.”)
Ironically, this new DOI process came to light because of a different FOIA, filed by the Center for Western Priorities. The group’s deputy director Aaron Weiss described to Roll Call that the documents showed “definitively that political appointees at the Interior Department are interfering with the Freedom of Information Act.” This new process is also slowing down the response time considerably, so much so that DOI is missing legally required deadlines, opening the process up to legal challenge.
In charge of the department’s FOIA processes is one Daniel Jorjani, the acting solicitor (aka the agency’s top politically appointed lawyer) and chief FOIA officer since last November.
On Tuesday, Jorjani faced Senate confirmation for his combined solicitor/FOIA officer position. Despite a grilling from Democrats, and the fact that he tacitly admitted to reviewing FOIA releases, he was confirmed out of committee with Republican votes. Earlier this month, Jorjani told Senator Angus King (I-ME) the he doesn’t “review FOIAs or make determinations.” But when Jorjani sent in a written response, that flat denial changed to say that he “typically did not review records,” which, of course, begs the question about when and why those atypical reviews occured.
Particularly given that prior FOIA’d documents show Jorjani, a former Koch operative and advisor on Russian energy investments(!), told a staffer that “at the end of the day, our job is to protect the Secretary.”
Which is weird, because we always thought the Department of Interior’s job was to protect public lands.
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