Federal agencies classify trillions of pages of documents each year—enough secrets to fill 20 million filing cabinets. Washington politicians and federal agencies routinely blindfold American citizens on the most important and most reckless decisions the government takes. As President Joe Biden told Special Counsel Robert Hur in late 2022, “We over-classify everything.... And 99.9% of it has nothing to do with anything I couldn’t pick up and read out loud to the public.”
The change in presidential administrations is the ideal chance for sweeping disclosures of pseudo-secrets that will provide a booster shot for American democracy.
President-elect Donald Trump should follow the precedent set by President Barack Obama. In 2009, Obama speedily released many of the secret George W. Bush administration legal memos that asserted that a president could declare martial law in the US and ignore the Fourth Amendment and other constitutional safeguards. Those disclosures helped portray Obama as a champion of civil liberties, regardless of his novel prerogative that presidents were entitled to assassinate American citizens who were designated as terrorist suspects. Unfortunately, Trump in his first term failed to open the files to disclose Obama’s biggest unconstitutional power grabs.
Federal secrecy is perhaps the most important bulwark of the Censorship Industrial Complex. Americans deserve to know how many blindfolds were slapped on Americans in recent years. The Supreme Court took a dive on the censorship issue last year by claiming that the victims did not have legal standing. It would be relatively simple to “correct” that decision by disclosing a torrent of cases of “Censors Gone Wild.” How many more humorous memes did the White House or federal agencies demand be suppressed? How many more internal emails or texts reveal White House appointees hellbent on muzzling critics regardless of the First Amendment?
Americans deserve to know whether federal agencies secretly targeted them as terrorist suspects. A year ago, the House Judiciary Committee revealed that, according to federal agencies, anything you purchase can be used against you. And if you didn’t want to be categorized as a “lone wolf” potential terrorist, you never should have bought that Bass Pro hat—one of the bizarre warning signs. If you bought a gun or ammo since 2021, federal bureaucrats may have automatically classified you as a “potential active shooter.” The shocking details of that surveillance scheme need to be exposed as quickly as possible. At the same time, the feds cast absurdly broad nets of suspicion on average Americans, potentially incriminating details of Biden family dealings with China, Romania, Ukraine, and other nations were kept secret. DC is one paradox after another.
The Founding Fathers recognized the perils of foreign entanglement but federal secrecy has shrouded the vast majority of details of recent US government blundering abroad. As I noted in an April 2023 Mises piece, practically the only candor regarding the Russia-Ukraine war occurred when secret documents leaked out revealing that the Ukrainian military was in far worse shape than the Biden administration claimed. The White House, State Department, and Pentagon were adamant that American citizens had no right to know how their tax dollars were being squandered in East Europe.
Since those leaks in early 2023, the US government apparently pulled plenty of strings and may have paid plenty of money to deter a ceasefire in that war. White House and State Department officials bluntly opposed any cessation in hostilities in Eastern Europe.
Opening files in the White House, Pentagon, State Department, and CIA could answer vital questions: Why was the US government seemingly doing everything possible to perpetuate the bloodbath? What steps, if any, did the White House take to prevent effective anti-fraud protections in the hundreds of billions of dollars in aid sent to Ukraine? Did Biden policymakers help perpetuate the Russia-Ukraine war to make Biden look tough or the world savior of democracy?
The Pentagon Papers, leaked in 1971 by Daniel Ellsberg, helped vaccinate Americans against blindly trusting any president seeking to con them into a foreign conflict. Unfortunately, that vaccination faded as decades passed. Opening files on the US intervention in Ukraine could make it far more difficult for future presidents to drag the US into a foreign conflict. As WikiLeaks’s Julian Assange observed: “If wars can be started by lies, they can be stopped by truth.”
President Trump must make opening the files a top priority because otherwise damn little sunlight will disinfect Washington. The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) has largely collapsed. Shortly before Trump’s first term, the House Committee on Government Oversight and Reform bluntly admitted: “FOIA is broken.” Federal agencies have a backlog of hundreds of thousands of FOIA requests they haven’t answered and responses sometimes take years. Never forget that the Food and Drug Administration claimed it would need 75 years to disclose the Pfizer application for its covid vaccine that the FDA approved in 108 days. Unfortunately, such idiocy is practically Standard Operating Procedure inside the Beltway. Prior to the 2016 election, the State Department declared that it would require 75 years to comply with its FOIA request for emails from the top aides of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (at a time when Hillary was running for president). Perhaps the only thing more absurd is the pretexts offered for refusing to disclose documents. The Drug Enforcement Administration denied a FOIA request by someone seeking “information about his own kidnappers… because he did not have a signed waiver from the men who had held him hostage,” the Washington Examiner reported.
A boot from the Trump White House will open far more filing cabinets than endless appeals to FOIA denials. The new president can reap the gratitude of millions of Americans for speedily shedding light on the biggest covid controversies. Why did the Centers for Disease Control in 2021 delay divulging the failure of covid vaccines to prevent infections and transmission? Are there other details waiting to be unearthed about how federal agencies bankrolled the reckless gain-of-function that escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology and killed seven million people around the globe?
Sweeping disclosures of federal secrets and outrages are one of the best ways to break the dominance of Washington insiders. In a 2002 decision condemning the Bush administration’s mass secret arrests after 9/11, a federal appeals court declared, “When government begins closing doors, it selectively controls information rightfully belonging to the people. Selective information is misinformation.” Washington’s pervasive secrecy vests vast power in any official who chooses to selectively leak documents to spin public perceptions.
President Trump’s first administration was crippled by leaks—including former FBI chief James Comey’s personal memos that were delivered to the New York Times, leading to the unjustified appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller who roiled American politics for two years. Trump’s first impeachment was spurred by the 2019 leak of his phone call transcript with the Ukrainian president. Sweeping disclosures of unjustified secrets will undercut federal officials who might seek to undermine the new president with misleading selective leaks.
Secrecy is not a technical glitch in administrative regimes. The whole point of secrecy is to prevent citizens from controlling the government. To expect bureaucracies to “correct” excessive secrecy is like expecting kings to abdicate their thrones. There is no reason for citizens to trust secretive federal programs more than Washington trusts American citizens.
Pervasive secrecy defines democracy: people merely select their Supreme Deceivers. If trillions of pages of new secrets a year is not a perversion of democracy, why not simply keep secret everything that the government does?
Attorney General Ramsey Clark warned in 1967: “Nothing so diminishes democracy as secrecy.” Yet Americans are still told that they are governing themselves because they are permitted to vote for presidents who appoint bureaucrats who drop an Iron Curtain around federal machinations.
In his Farewell Address on Wednesday evening, President Biden warned: “Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation enabling the abuse of power.” During the pandemic, the biggest misinformation of them all was Biden’s promise that anyone who got the covid vaccine would never be infected with covid. Biden also declared, “The truth is smothered by lies told for power and for profit.” Secrecy and lying are two sides of the same political coin. If Biden is worried about “lies told for power,” then he should not have perpetuated the secrecy regime that is an entitlement program for Washington liars.
Even libertarians and pro-freedom zealots who oppose Trump should support exposing all the recent abuses committed by Washington politicians and bureaucrats. Shocking Americans by exposing federal crimes could provide an anti-Leviathan vaccination. That could be effective regardless of whether the Food and Drug Administration ever approves that vax.
