As a guest on NBC’s Late Night with Seth Meyers, former White House press secretary Josh Earnest declared Barack Obama to be the “most transparent president in history.” That was such malarkey that even an ardent Obama supporter like Meyers wasn’t even buying it.
Obama did promise to be the most transparent administration in U.S. history, but failed royally. Meyers honed in on the administration’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) blunders and noted that studies showed Obama fulfilled fewer FOIA requests than previous administrations.
“Did he fail to live up to that transparency?” Meyers asked.
Earnest denied, denied, denied and made the declaration that he was a part of the most transparent administration the U.S. has ever known.
Surprisingly, Meyers hammered back, asking, “By what metrics are you using?”
“See, this is where you’re a good press secretary,” Meyers interjected as Earnest dodged. “Because I see, like, you’re not going to tell me any lies, but I feel like you’re going to tell a different truth than the one I am asking about.”
Earnest would never answer Meyers’ specific question if Obama failed to live up to the transparency promise when it came to FOIA requests and often stuttered through his answers.
“Uh, what I can tell you is, there was no presidential directive that came down to any agency that said, ‘You should make it really hard to respond to Freedom of Information Act requests,” Earnest said before touting a 90% response rate for FOIA requests.
Again, Meyers noted that those documents that were released were highly redacted and other times the administration would simply say, “We can’t find it.”
Earnest continued defending his former boss, saying at least Obama made a “good faith effort” to be transparent. He also bragged that Obama did something no other president had done before: released the names on the White House guest registry. That’s something George W. Bush went to the Supreme Court to block, he added. Whereas the Obama administration, he continued, did so “voluntarily,” as if it was some grand feat. Earnest pointed out that the Trump administration has since rolled back that policy.
Meyers was not impressed: “Well, to be fair, it made sense that President Obama would do it because cool people showed up all the time… there’s Jay-Z and Beyonce. They showed up.”
“It wasn’t Kid Rock and Sarah Palin,” Earnest said, getting in a final jab.
But even PolitiFact is unable to back up Earnest's claim. According to its Obameter, it was promised that Obama “will not sign any non-emergency bill without giving the American public an opportunity to review and comment on the White House website for five days." That never happened.
And who could forget when the Obama administration promised to televise health care negotiations live on C-SPAN to give everyone a “seat at the table?” That never happened, either. In fact, they just passed the thing without knowing every line item detail, which was another promise Obama made, that he would personally go “line by line to make sure that we are not spending money unwisely.”
President Opaque is more like it.
