From The Atlantic.
“FOIA is what enables regular people to pester powerful federal agencies into handing over information about what they’ve been up to. FOIA’s website calls it “the law that keeps citizens in the know about their government.” Though a tad grandiose, that characterization is pretty much accurate. And never has such a tool been quite so vital as with the current White House, which has adopted a policy of unabashedly lying about pretty much everything…
…“There has to be an expression of intent by Congress to treat a particular record or group of records as something that is a congressional record—that it belongs to Congress and is only being given to an agency for a specific purpose,” explained Lee Steven, assistant vice president with Cause of Action Institute, a pro-transparency, anti-big government nonprofit. “What the courts have in the past said is that you can’t put a blanket, before-the-fact designation” on such a broad category. As such, Steven told me, Hensarling’s directive is an egregious, possibly illegal case of overreach.”
