Jack Abramoff and "W" - Where is the White House Guest Book?
President Bush met Abramoff on at least four occasions the White House has yet to acknowledge, according to the draft report by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
...Perhaps the most significant was the repeal of a policy outlined in an Oct. 12, 2001, letter to federal agencies by then-Attorney General John Ashcroft that effectively urged them to resist Freedom of Information Act requests. Although it came soon after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, its reach went well beyond national security. The attorney general expressed a concern that "institutional, commercial and personal privacy interests" could be jeopardized by the use of the 35-year-old law. He assured agency heads that the "Department of Justice will defend your decisions" to withhold records, unless such denials lacked a "sound legal basis."
On his first days in office, Obama restored a "presumption in favor of disclosure" on FOIA requests. "The government," he said, "should not keep information confidential merely because public officials might be embarrassed by disclosure, because errors and failures might be revealed, or because of speculative or abstract fears."
Obama also repealed his predecessor's 2001 executive order that endowed former presidents and their heirs with near-absolute authority to invoke executive privilege to keep presidential records secret. Obama's order re-established the principle that White House records belong to the public - while maintaining a necessary process for current and former presidents to review and withhold documents whose disclosure might have negative national security implications....
