“Jim Kouri” - Rep. Issa grilling homeland security officials today
April 1, 2011 Jim Kouri
March 31st, 2011
Congressman Darrell Issa (R-CA), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, will hold a public hearing today with ranking members of the Department of Homeland Security to discuss the agency's handling of its disclosure responsibilities.
Several news organizations and public-interest groups have complained that DHS allows political appointees to play a pivotal role in prioritizing or censoring information it is required to release under the agency’s Freedom of information Act (FOIA) guidelines.
Even lawmakers have complained about the DHS's handling of FOIA requests. After Rep. Issa began chairing the committee in January, his first act was to request that DHS officials to submit to his office thousands of pages of records, memoranda, and emails between agency officials.
However, Issa claimed DHS’s submission of documents was too slow, and in February he forced two of the department’s employees to submit to transcribed interviews before his committee.
DHS officials repeatedly claim they will cooperate with Issa and his committee's and they pointed to the thousands of documents the department had turned over to the committee already. They also claimed that it has taken more than 20 staff members, most of whom are attorneys, to work exclusively on Issa's committee FOIA requests.
However, according to Issa’s office, a whistleblower from within the agency has come forward with information that contradicts what DHS officials and documents are telling him.
Now today, Issa will finally get his chance to publicly address his concerns with Mary Ellen Callahan, the department’s chief privacy officer, and Ivan Fong, the DHS’s general counsel. Both Callahan and Fong are political appointees by the Obama White House.
Issa’s probe of political officers at DHS and the role they play in the FOIA process is a result of an AP news report in July -- a time in which the House was still dominated by Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats.
The AP report stated that top DHS officials had instructed career employees to turn over sensitive FOIA requests to President Obama’s political advisers first before releasing them to anyone outside of the Administration.