Executive Order 13233 On November 1, 2001, Bush issued Executive Order 13233, limiting the access to the records of former U.S. Presidents. Many critics have noted that the five-page executive order, drafted by the White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales, would give either an incumbent president or a former president the right to withhold the former president's papers from the public. Enacting Executive Order 13233 was not the first time Bush and White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales had resisted clear law about Freedom of Information in Government. It had also occurred as then-Governor Bush was leaving office in Texas, when nearly 2000 boxes of documents were withheld by G.W. Bush from the Texas State Archives. Bush avoided that FOIA by placing them in daddy's Presidential Library.
On March 1, 2007, a subcommittee of the Committee on Government Reform held a hearing on bill H.R. 1255, the Presidential Records Act Amendments of 2007. This bill was also introduced by Rep. Henry Waxman, Chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, and its goal was to void Order 13233. At the hearing, several historians argued that Executive Order 13233 has severely curtailed public access to presidential records and added to delays in obtaining materials from presidential libraries. The bill was reported favorably by the full committee, and on March 14, 2007, the House passed the bill in an overwhelmingly bipartisan vote of 333-93. The bill also passed on June 13, 2007 in a Senate committee, but was never brought to the floor for a vote, reportedly due to a hold placed on the measure by Kentucky Republican Senator Jim Bunning As a result, the bill never made it to the floor before the end of the 110 Congress.
On Wednesday, January 21, 2009, Executive Order 13233 was revoked by executive order of President Obama. He essentially restored the wording of Executive Order 12667, by repeating most of the text of that order with minor changes. One notable change is that vice presidential records are explicitly covered by his new order. This will include G.H.W. Bush under Reagan as well as his four year term as President. Bush will be likely to add additional volumes to his library at Southern Methodist University.
What still remains to be done is address the PRA violations of the missing volumes of email and conducting political and campaigning business on White House servers. This buries the culpable players in the fired US Attorneys scandal and sheds more emphasis on the need to continue subpoenas for Karl Rove, Harriet Miers and Josh Bolten. It is hard to imagine the gravy hasn't seen the shredder by now but at least Obama's claim for transparency has shown some intent with this quick and decisive move on his first day in office. Future FOIA discoveries will be very interesting to connect the dots of Dick Cheney and G.H.W. Bush from the twelve years of Reagan /Bush conspiracies.
Feel free to let Obama and Biden know you appreciate the effort and hope that this starts a process of further investigations into the numerous black holes circulating through the eight year time warp from which we have just emerged. CHANGE.GOV
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