ABC News has a follow up on CREW's request for a Congressional investigation to determine whether the Obama administration is violating the Presidential Records Act and the Federal Records Act. ABC News spoke to the White House, but the White House had no comment:

CREW wrote a letter to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform asking it to investigate and hold hearings to determine any violations of the Presidential Records Act (PRA) and Federal Records Act (FRA).
 
The group’s letter is in response to an article in The New York Times on June 25 that said Obama White House officials have met “hundreds of times” over the last 18 months with prominent Washington lobbyists.
 
“But because the discussions are not taking place at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, they are not subject to disclosure on the visitors’ log that the White House releases as part of its pledge to be the “most transparent presidential administration in history,” the New York Times reported.  
 
The Times also reported that lobbyists said they “routinely” get emails from White House staff members’ personal accounts, not their White House emails which are subject to public records review.
 
The White House declined to comment on the CREW letter calling for the investigation.

As Nick Baumann from Mother Jones explains, CREW spent years monitoring -- and suing -- the Bush administration over its failures to comply with the Federal Records Act (FRA) and Presidential Records Act (PRA). Obama vowed transparency. But, we are starting to see allegations of similar behavior from staffers in the Obama administration:

On Friday, the New York Times reported that Obama administration officials use their personal email accounts and hold "off-campus" coffee shop meetings with lobbyists in an apparent attempt to skirt disclosure rules. Now Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), a DC watchdog group, has penned a letter (PDF) to the House Oversight and Government Reform committee requesting a hearing and pointing to apparent "wilful violations" of federal law. 

 

The allegations suggest that the Obama administration may be flouting the same recordkeeping laws that the Bush administration did: the federal and presidential records acts (FRA and PRA). Both laws require that White House staff retain records—including emails—related to their daily work. By using private email accounts to schedule coffee shop meetings with lobbyists (an apparent attempt to prevent these sessions from appearing in White House visitor logs), Obama officials can bypass normal email archiving procedures and "avoid the creation of any record that would memorialize those meetings." Since emails scheduling meetings with lobbyists would almost certainly be the type of emails that the FRA and PRA require White House officials to preserve, the Obama team is "in violation" of the FRA and the PRA, CREW writes.

During the Bush years, Democrats often criticized Republicans, including White House political director Karl Rove, for similar conduct—and CREW waged a years-long campaign to recover Bush emails that went missing or were never properly archived. In the early years of the Bush administration, for example, many White House officials used Republican National Committee email addresses to conduct official business. The RNC email archives were later lost; most of Rove's emails from his first few years in the White House will probably never be recovered.

Today, CREW asked the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform to investigate and hold hearings on the extent to which White House staff violated the Presidential Records Act (PRA) and Federal Records Act (FRA) by using private email accounts in exchanges with lobbyists and by holding meetings with lobbyists outside of the White House.  You can read CREW’s letter here.

CREW has been involved in litigation against the Bush and Obama White Houses concerning both the preservation of electronic records and White House visitor logs.

CREW’s letter follows a June 25, 2010 New York Times article revealing that White House staff routinely use their personal email accounts rather than their official White House accounts to communicate with lobbyists to avoid any public scrutiny of this correspondence. In addition, top White House staff meet with lobbyists at off-campus locations, including a coffee shop catty-corner to the White House, to avoid having the visits memorialized in White House visitor logs:

There are no Secret Service agents posted next to the barista and no presidential seal on the ceiling, but the Caribou Coffee across the street from the White House has become a favorite meeting spot to conduct Obama administration business.

Here at the Caribou on Pennsylvania Avenue, and a few other nearby coffee shops, White House officials have met hundreds of times over the last 18 months with prominent K Street lobbyists — members of the same industry that President Obama has derided for what he calls its “outsized influence” in the capital.

On the agenda over espressos and lattes, according to more than a dozen lobbyists and political operatives who have taken part in the sessions, have been front-burner issues like Wall Street regulation, health care rules, federal stimulus money, energy policy and climate control — and their impact on the lobbyists’ corporate clients.

But because the discussions are not taking place at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, they are not subject to disclosure on the visitors’ log that the White House releases as part of its pledge to be the “most transparent presidential administration in history.”

The off-site meetings, lobbyists say, reveal a disconnect between the Obama administration’s public rhetoric — with Mr. Obama himself frequently thrashing big industries’ “battalions” of lobbyists as enemies of reform — and the administration’s continuing, private dealings with them.

When we sent the letter, CREW's Melanie Sloan said:

It is outrageous that White House staff are deliberately using personal email accounts – in violation of the law – to hide the fact that they are in touch with lobbyists. This is what all the administration’s anti-lobbyist rhetoric gets you – less transparency. Rather than being open and clear about who is influencing White House policy, the White House is trying to hide who it’s really talking to. Even worse, the public is being suckered with lofty rhetoric about the evils of the same lobbyists White House officials are meeting with.

Under federal records laws, White House staff are required to preserve all emails relating to official business. As part of the settlement of CREW’s email suit, the White House revamped its electronic records management system to capture all federal and presidential records and claimed its current system prevents employees from accessing private email accounts. Although last spring it was revealed that White House aide Andrew McLaughlin had consulted with his former colleagues at Google about policy matters using his private email address, the White House said the breach was “inadvertent” and had “no influence on policy decisions within the federal government.” The Times report undermines that claim.

The Obama administration settled CREW’s lawsuit over White House visitor logs by agreeing to post all visitor logs online and has frequently touted having the most transparent White House in history. Melanie Sloan also said:

While off-campus meetings with lobbyists are not necessarily illegal, they do suggest the White House can’t live with its own anti-lobbyist standards, but won’t admit to that. This is a way for the White House to hide exactly how much its top staffers do meet with lobbyists. Congressional hearings would force the administration to come clean with the American people.

Announced today via the White House blog:

We are proud to announce today the next step in the President’s efforts to reduce the influence of special interests on the federal government. Today, the President signed a memorandum directing agencies in the Executive Branch not to appoint or re-appoint currently-registered federal lobbyists to advisory boards or commissions. This directive formalizes an aspiration we first announced last September and that agencies have implemented successfully on a trial basis ever since.

• Read the Presidential Memorandum.

For too long, lobbyists have wielded disproportionate influence in Washington.  It’s one thing for lobbyists to represent their clients’ interests in petitions to the government, but it’s quite another, and not appropriate, for lobbyists to hold privileged positions could enable them to advocate for their clients from within the government.   It was for this reason that the President took steps on his first day in office to close the revolving door through which lobbyists rotated between private industry and full-time executive branch positions.  Today’s step goes further by barring lobbyist appointments to part-time agency advisory positions.

According to news reports, Andrew McLaughlin, Deputy Chief Technology Officer for the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, has been using his private Gmail account to communicate with lobbyists for Google, his former employer, as well as other senior White House officials.  Sound familiar?  Recall that during the Bush administration, top White House officials were using RNC email accounts to conduct official business, a practice that allowed them to bypass the White House email archiving system.

The Obama administration, as part of its settlement with CREW and the National Security Archive in the missing Bush-era White House emails lawsuit, had promised that the EOP network, as currently configured, does not allow staff to access personal email accounts.  CREW asked for further confirmation in light of Mr. McLaughlin’s success in accessing his Gmail account.  The response?  The Department of Justice, in its role as counsel for the White House, refused to confirm anything beyond quoting from a January 2010 letter memorializing the White House’s earlier promise, made well before news of Mr. McLaughlin’s more recent activities leaked out.  In other words, a non-responsive response. 

Fortunately the White House was willing to be more forthcoming than DOJ.  A lawyer from the White House Counsel’s Office stated in an email to CREW:

Our technical folks confirmed that you cannot access Gmail and other web based external systems through the EOP network.

So apparently whatever Mr. McLaughlin was doing on his Gmail account, he was doing it from home or, at least, not from work.

But that still leaves CREW’s other questions to the White House unanswered, namely was Mr. McLaughlin using his Gmail account to conduct official business and, if so, what steps has the EOP taken to preserve any emails he sent or received on his Gmail account that were not captured by the EOP’s electronic record keeping system? 

DOJ claims these questions are outside the scope of CREW’s lawsuit and refused to provide answers.  And there has been only silence so far from the White House on these questions.  Everyone screws up now and again but when it comes to transparency and accountability, the true test is what you do in the face of a screw-up – stonewall, deny, or come forward with the truth. 

We are still waiting to see which course this White House takes.

This is Sunshine Week, a time when activists, journalists and organizations such as CREW make a special effort to remind Americans why the principles of transparency in government are so important to our democracy. A recent poll of Americans by the Scripps Survey Research Center revealed their views on secrecy in government. Here are some highlights:

* When asked if there is "more secrecy, less secrecy or about the same amount of secrecy in the Obama administration as in the previous administration," 38 percent said the amount of secrecy is about the same, 34 percent said the government has become less secret under Obama and 22 percent said it has become even more secretive.

* Only 32 percent were familiar with President Obama's order instructing all federal agencies to adopt a "presumption in favor of disclosure" when handling requests under the federal Freedom of Information Act.

* The public believes that state and local governments are more "open and transparent” in their operations than the federal government. Forty-eight percent of those surveyed said their state governments were very or somewhat secretive. And only 36 percent rated their local governments as very or somewhat secretive.

The Huffington Post reports:

Hordes of lobbyists have deregistered in the last two years after Congress enacted more onerous disclosure requirements and the Obama administration put in place a series of anti-lobbyist policies. But that doesn't mean there's been less lobbying.

In fact, we'll likely find out this week (when fourth-quarter reports are filed) that the influence industry beat its all-time record for lobbying revenue in 2009.

Huffington's story included this assessment by CREW Executive Director Melanie Sloan:

"This is the consequence of the Obama administration demonizing lobbyists and so the result is more and more deregistration. It's an unsurprising reaction to the administration's efforts to make lobbying less and less palatable."

That's the question asked by the Project on Government Oversight. POGO's Bryan Rahija commends the Obama administration's just-announced Open Government Directive as a welcome "shift away from a policy of secrecy in all areas of the federal governance process."

Yet Rahija adds this cautionary note:

... it will be up to our community to ensure all open government initiatives live up to their potential.

Only time will tell if the document will go down as the Magna Carta of government transparency, or just another memo for the archive. For now, it's worth commending the White House for taking this first step.

In other words, we must welcome the announcement, yet monitor the implementation. Or, to borrow a Reagan era phrase, we must "trust but verify."

Yesterday, news outlets were reporting on an article from the Washington Times about the Obama administration and its donors. In an interview with the Baltimore Sun, Melanie Sloan provided some perspective and identified the real issue:

One government watchdog group said it was neither surprised nor especially troubled to learn the White House had given special access and attention to top donors. More worrisome would be if the White House were promising specific policy actions in exchange for contributions, said Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. (emphasis added)

"Is it in any way surprising that top donors get better treatment and more information than the rest of us? No,'' Sloan said. The newspaper said two people who had raised money received invitations to use the private bowling alley at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next to the White House. That is a separate alley from the one-lane facility in the White House built during the Nixon administration.

Over the first months of the Obama administration, CREW has encountered less than promised transparency on several fronts. We've even had to go to court to obtain information that shouldn't be so hard to obtain. So, the lack of transparency in something as complicated as negotiations over health care reform doesn't surprise us. But, the President should be transparent about that:

Obama is learning what some political observers said during the campaign — that it’s unreasonable to promise open negotiations on an issue as complicated as health reform.

“I guess I just never believed it when it was promised. It seemed unrealistic,” said Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “Nobody can have all their negotiations in public because then you never get to ‘yes.’”

But that doesn’t mean Obama’s off the hook, Sloan said. The president needs to explain why he’s not living up to his campaign promise and should at least be briefing the public on what’s happening in the meetings, she said.

On the campaign trail last year, Obama promised an unprecedented level of transparency.