Should they be? When Republicans are colluding with Russians, should Democrats be transparent?
Time and again, President Donald Trump has asserted that his administration has achieved championship-level transparency
www.politifact.com
Pants on fire. That says it all.
But does his administration live up to the hype? It does not, whether one looks at his relations with Mueller’s team, his refusal to release his tax returns, or his unwillingness to cooperate with subpoenas from Congress.
The Trump White House was partially, but not fully, cooperative with the investigation. It did
turn over 1.4 million papers, and it didn’t stop some two dozen administration officials from testifying to Mueller. But in other ways, White House cooperation fell short.
As we’ve
reported, Mueller and his team sought for more than a year to personally talk to the president, but they were ultimately rebuffed. The special counsel eventually agreed to accept Trump’s written answers to questions, but his responses were "inadequate," Mueller said, and contained dozens of instances where Trump claimed not to recall the information sought. Mueller also noted that Trump declined to answer questions about
obstruction of justice, or questions on events that occurred during the presidential transition.
In addition, Mueller documented instances of Trump trying to impede the investigation or directing his staff to do so, including firing Mueller. "The president’s efforts to influence the investigation were mostly unsuccessful," the Mueller report notes, "but that is largely because the persons who surrounded the president declined to carry out orders or accede to his requests."
While Trump campaign officials have testified in the past to congressional investigative committees, the White House has prevented officials — and even former officials — from testifying or submitting documents to Congress since the Mueller report’s release. These include former White House counsel
Don McGahn, former White House communications director
Hope Hicks, and one of McGahn’s top aides, Annie Donaldson.
Trump has also sued to block subpoenas for his business records by the House Oversight and Reform Committee, and he’s sued to stop two banks he worked with —
Deutsche Bank and Capital One — from cooperating with congressional subpoenas.
President Bill Clinton asserted executive privilege during the investigation into his affair with Monica Lewinsky, as did President Barack Obama during the investigation into the "Fast and Furious" program, in which federal agents allowed guns to be sold and brought into Mexico so they could trace the weapons.
But experts say that Trump is well on his way to meeting or exceeding the scale of opposition by President Richard Nixon during Watergate, when non-cooperation with congressional subpoenas became a crucial element of impeachment articles against him.
Press briefings halted
Trump reversed a practice begun under Obama of publicly releasing White House visitor logs.
March 2018 showing that "the federal government censored, withheld or said it couldn't find records sought by citizens, journalists and others more often last year than at any point in the past decade."
And in November 2018, the pro-transparency FOIA Project released data showing that Freedom of Information Act lawsuits
reached a record high in fiscal year 2018.
Even one area that might be considered heightened transparency -- Trump’s Twitter feed -- actually serves to undermine scrutiny and openness.
Trump’s tweets do provide an almost stream-of-consciousness report of what’s on his mind -- the kinds of insights that would normally emerge after a president left office and released diaries or wrote memoirs, said Laurie L. Rice, a political scientist at Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville.
The downside, though, is that Trump’s tweets often contain inaccuracies, contradictory information, or unclear arguments
We rate the statement Pants on Fire.