Putin in the Red Zone, WH and NATO in Lockeroom

Posted on March 31, 2014March 31, 2014 by Denise Simon

While Vladimir Putin is moving to Federalize Crimea and Ukraine, the Baltic States are not getting any support from NATO as Article 5 (an attack on one is an attack on others) is but a quiet whisper. The United States has an agreement with Ukraine titled the Budapest Memorandum. This is a handshake that the United States will come to the aid of Ukraine in exchange for Ukraine giving up their nuclear weapons which they did, gave them up to Russia. But while eyes are on Russian forces at Ukraine’s border with Russia, many other Baltic States are in deep worry as to what comes next. John Kerry met with Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov for four hours on March 31 in Paris to work out the next moves of each while Kerry required Russia to move their troops. Russia has refused, yet there was some troop movement where some take this as a sign to calm tensions. It needs to be known however, such is not the case.

Russia is performing military drills at the border of Finland.

Finland Frets as Russia Launches Military Drills on Its Doorstep

According to Dr. Jonathan Eyal, international director at London’s Royal United Services Institute think tank, there is “no question” that these exercises show that Russia is testing its power in the region, which was reshaped by the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.

“In pure capability terms, the Russians are preparing an operation,” Eyal said. “The question is: Is there an actual military threat? I do not think there will be.”

Eyal said that while Russia’s annexation of Crimea has put a spotlight on its foreign policy, tension with Finland and Sweden is not new. This was shown as recently as last year when Russian jets flew toward Swedish airspace, causing Stockholm to scramble its air force, he said.

But he said that Scandinavia and the Baltic states have sensed renewed danger in recent days because “Putin is an opportunist, and if the opportunity arises he will pick up on it.”

Andrew Kutchins, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the proximity of the drills had made the alarm most palpable in Finland.

“The people of Helsinki are nervous,” he said. “What Putin is doing is sending shock waves through Europe.” However, Kutchins added that the likelihood of immediate military action appeared “very far-fetched.”

This anxiety was heightened Sunday after one of Putin’s closest former advisers told the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet that the Kremlin would seek “historical justice” by reclaiming Finland and ex-Soviet countries as part of an enlarged Russian Federation.

“Putin’s view is that he protects what belongs to him and his predecessors,” wrote Andrei Illarionov, according to a translation by the Moscow Times.

“Parts of Georgia, Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic states and Finland are states where Putin claims to have ownership,” said Illarionov, who is now a senior fellow at the Washington, D.C.,-based Cato Institute.

Illarionov, who was chief economic adviser to Putin until 2005 and is described by the Moscow Times as an outspoken Kremlin critic, said Putin could argue the Communist revolution of 1917 was a “treason against national interests.”

“It is not on Putin’s agenda today or tomorrow,” Illarionov added. “But if Putin is not stopped, the issue will be brought sooner or later.”

“Finland isn’t Ukraine”

The reason experts think Finland is more secure than Ukraine is that although neither are members of NATO, the former is more protected by its European Union membership.

“Finland isn’t Ukraine,” said Oliver Bullough, commentator and author of “Last Man In Russia.” “It might not be a NATO member but it is in the European Union and you can bet that if Russia were to start invading members of the E.U., the E.U. would have something to say about it.”

Bullough said the Russians had a “grudging respect” for the Finns because of the way they resisted Moscow’s Red Army during World War II. Apart from Britain and the Soviet Union, Finland was the only European nation involved in the war to avert a foreign occupation.

Research consultant Kathleen McInnis pointed out that Finland is connected to NATO in that it has taken part in NATO-led actions, including Kosovo and Afghanistan.

“Recently there has been discussion in Finland about joining NATO, but opinion remains in favor of a defense partnership with Sweden,” said McInnis, who is based at the London-based think tank Chatham House.

Add to that Finland’s recent agreement to start discussions with Sweden over a defense partnership, and an incursion by Moscow looks less likely.

Perhaps the key difference between Finland and Ukraine is that Putin does not have a tangible excuse with which to exercise the Kremlin’s influence abroad.

In the swift annexation of Crimea, he spoke of the need to protect ethnic Russians living in the peninsula from what he called the illegitimate fascist regime in Kiev.

But Eyal said that it is wrong to assume Russia’s only option is a brute-force invasion.

“Russia could put pressure on Scandinavia not to come to the aid of the three Baltic states [Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania], which do have Russian ethnic minorities,” he said. “Or they could warn in advance for Finland and Sweden not to join NATO. It’s a key foreign policy for Russia to prevent NATO’s enlargement.”

Albina Kovalyova reported from Moscow. Alexander Smith and Alastair Jamieson reported from London.

So what is being said about Finland?

One of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s closest ex-advisers has claimed that the ex-KGB agent ultimately wants to reclaim Finland for Russia.

Andrej Illiaronov, Putin’s economic adviser between 2000 and 2005 and now senior member of the Cato Institute think tank, said that “parts of Georgia, Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic States and Finland are states where Putin claims to have ownership.”

“Putin’s view is that he protects what belongs to him and his predecessors,” he said.

When asked if Putin wishes to return to the Russia of the last tsar, Nicholas II, Illiaronov said: “Yes, if it becomes possible.”

Illiaronov admits that Finland is not Putin’s primary concern at present but, if not stopped in other areas of Eastern Europe, the issue will one day arise. Russian troops are currently massing on the eastern border of Ukraine, following Russia’s recent annexation of Crimea.

“Putin said several times that the Bolsheviks and Communists made big mistakes. He could well say that the Bolsheviks in 1917 committed treason against Russian national interests by providing Finland’s independence,” Illiaronov told a Swedish news website.

He believes that Putin is not planning to invade Ukraine for territorial gain but rather “the goal is a pro-Russian puppet government in Kiev.”

“Six years ago Putin conquered Abkhazia and South Ossetia from Georgia. The west let him do it with impunity, and now he has got Crimea,” he continued.

“Now, eastern and southern Ukraine is destablised so that the self-defence forces can take power there. If the situation allows, it may be a military invasion.”

Finland was a part of the Russian Empire for 108 years but broke away in 1917 at the end of the first world war.

The Scandinavian nation was attacked at the beginning of the second world war by the Soviet Union, with Finland fighting the winter war and the continuation war in resistance and losing 10% of its pre-war territory.

Finland is not a member of Nato, so any invasion of its land would not constitute an attack against all members under Article 5 of Nato’s founding Washington Treaty.

Fast and Furious Part Deux

Posted on March 31, 2014March 31, 2014 by Denise Simon

Contempt, Oversight hearing, more contempt. The original story of Fast and Furious has been litigated and yet there is no solution or consequence, when in fact another operation has since occurred named Operation Fearless. At the core of these two operations is the Department of Justice, ATF and hired operatives.

Darrell Issa: Reprimand of ‘Fast and Furious’ official justifies Eric Holder contempt lawsuit

House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Darrell Issa believes new disciplinary action against a government operative in the “Fast and Furious” gun running scandal reinforces a Congressional contempt charge against Attorney General Eric Holder.

Issa, R-Calif., said former Arizona U.S. Attorney Dennis Burke “undoubtedly deserved” the reprimand he received from the Arizona State Bar for leaking information to the press about the gun-running operation. Issa said it also justifies the GOP-led lawsuit against Holder for information relating to the matter.

“Dennis Burke’s disciplinary agreement with the Arizona State Bar makes clear his belief that Eric Holder’s Justice Department was more interested in politically protecting itself than giving Congress full information about what happened in Operation Fast and Furious,” Issa said on Monday.

Burke was reprimanded last week by the Arizona Bar for leaking classified Fast and Furious documents to two media outlets.

Republican lawmakers are entangled with Holder in a court case stemming from a June 2012 House vote to hold him in contempt of Congress for failing to turn over documents and emails related to the gun-trafficking case.

Both sides are preparing to present arguments before a federal judge, who will then issue a judgement in the case. So far, the judge has rejected efforts by the Justice Department to dismiss the House lawsuit.

“These documents will shed light on the nature of the Department’s false denials of improper conduct and its response to Congress, including misconduct of which Dennis Burke was aware, that Attorney General Holder refused to discuss with Congress,” Issa said.

The Fast and Furious operation was run by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to try to trace gun sales to Mexican drug cartels. The program, which was based out of Phoenix between 2009 and 2011, when Burke headed the Attorney General’s office there, ended up allowing more than 1,400 guns to be smuggled over the Mexican border and one of them was used to kill a U.S. Border Patrol agent.

Burke told the Arizona Bar and congressional investigators in an earlier interview that he leaked the Justice Department information to the media to provide more transparency about the matter.

But Issa said Monday he believes Burke gave out the information to reveal who inside the government had originally blown the whistle on the deeply flawed operation.

“His actions to selectively leak a single document supporting a misleading narrative, though a common tactic in the Obama administration, was a cowardly and self-serving action intended to smear a whistleblower,” Issa said.

Now we move on to Operation Fearless

The Committee first became aware of Operation Fearless, a storefront operation in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, from media reports in January 2013. These reports made clear that Operation Fearless was fundamentally mismanaged, evidenced by the fact that nearly $40,000 in merchandise and three guns were stolen from ATF agents during the operation, including a fully-automatic rifle. After months of delay, ATF officials finally briefed congressional staff on April 15, 2013, representing that such storefront operations were limited to the single instance in Milwaukee. Subsequent media reports, however, revealed that the ATF used these same storefront stings across the country. In one case, the ATF exploited a mentally disabled man to work at the storefront. In another, the ATF had a mentally disabled man tattoo a squid smoking a joint on his neck.

The Committee’s Subpoena Requires ATF to Provide Documents Including:

· Communications relating to Operation Fearless Distributing and the Monitored Case Program at ATF.

· Operational plans and relevant Reports of Investigation for undercover storefront operations conducted around the country.

· Documents relating to authorization for ATF agents to sell weapons during these operations.

· ATF policies for conducting undercover storefront operations.

· Relevant Reports of Investigation, for undercover storefront operations conducted between January 1, 2010 and March 19, 2014, in any of the following cities:

o Milwaukee, Wisconsin

o Portland, Oregon

o Wichita, Kansas

o Albuquerque, New Mexico

o Pensacola, Florida

o Atlanta, Georgia

_________________________________________

Some things concocted by government and then approved are not only disgusting but deadly.

Obamacare, Announces 6 million What Exactly

Posted on March 31, 2014March 31, 2014 by Denise Simon

Enrolling is one thing, window shopping is one thing, choosing a plan is one thing, understanding a plan is one thing, paying for health insurance is the last thing that this administration wants to talk about. March 31 is the last day to BUY, exchange money for Obamacare, yet who really has coverage and what kind of coverage? It should especially be noted that while the healthcare dot gov website is unstable when it comes to actually working, it should also be noted that a very certain key component of the site has not been built at all and that is the interface to the actual health insurance carriers.

Let’s look closer for some truth shall we?

Making up good news about Obamacare

The Obama administration is celebrating that it has achieved its (downwardly revised) goal of signing up more than 6 million Americans for Obamacare by 11:59 p.m. March 31. Mission accomplished!

Not quite. The administration has not revealed how many of those 6 million people have paid their premiums. If you have not paid, you have not actually “enrolled.” It’s like putting merchandise in your Amazon cart but never clicking “buy.”

Besides, the number that matters is not how many Americans signed up for Obamacare but rather how many previously uninsured Americans signed up for Obamacare. By that standard, Obamacare may be headed for an epic failure.

Recall that between 5 million and 6 million Americans lost their health plans because of Obamacare last fall. If the administration now succeeds in signing up 5 million to 6 million previously insured Americans, it will have achieved . . . nothing. Breaking even is no great accomplishment.

And let’s not forget: Many of those new Obamacare sign-ups are self-sufficient people who were previously paying their own way and now receive government subsidies for insurance. Creating government dependency is not progress — it’s a step backward.

The stated goal of Obamacare was not to move millions of privately insured Americans into taxpayer-subsidized health coverage. The goal was to cover the uninsured. That was the justification for all the chaos and disruption Americans have experienced — and that is the standard by which the administration should be judged.

So how is it doing? We don’t know yet, but the signs are not good. A March survey by McKinsey & Co. found that only 27 percent of consumers who had purchased new coverage in the individual insurance market in February were previously uninsured — up from 11 percent in January. But McKinsey also found that the payment rate for the previously uninsured was just 53 percent, compared with 86 percent for the previously insured. Remember: Those who sign up and do not pay are not actually enrolled.

Goldman Sachs is projecting that only 1 million Obamacare sign-ups will come from previously uninsured Americans. Indeed, it estimates that the number of total signups will be just 4 million — not 6 million, as the administration claims — because “HHS figures . . . count all persons who selected an ACA exchange plan regardless of whether or not they have actually completed the enrollment process by paying their premium.” Goldman Sachs also anticipates that fully 75 percent of all the Obamacare sign-ups will be from people who already had insurance.

The administration faces a similar problem with Medicaid enrollments. President Obama recently declared, “We’ve got close to 7 million Americans who have access to health care for the first time because of Medicaid expansion.” That statement is flat untrue.

The president assumes that every single one of those Medicaid enrollees is getting health insurance for the first time because of Obamacare. But according to his own Department of Health and Human Services, that number includes people previously enrolled in Medicaid who are deemed eligible for another year, as well as people who would have been eligible under the law before Obamacare. The fact is, HHS does not know how many of the Medicaid signups are “newly eligible” and how many would have signed up anyway. If HHS doesn’t know, how can the president know? The answer is: He can’t.

Over any given six-month period since 2008, between 1.5 million and 2.5 million people have joined the Medicaid rolls just by the natural expansion of the program. Much of that figure, then, is likely just regular Medicaid growth that has nothing to do with Obamacare. Moreover, the health consulting firm Avalere examined the state-by-state numbers and estimates that only 1.1 million to 1.8 million of the claimed enrollees could be attributed to Obamacare. That’s a lot fewer than 7 million.

The Obama administration is so anxious for some good news about this law that if it doesn’t have any, it just makes some up.

There are other problems with Obamacare — coming cancellations of employer-based plans, not having enough young healthy enrollees to play for the old and the sick, skyrocketing deductibles and massive premium hikes despite Obama’s pledge to “cut the cost of a typical family’s premium by up to $2,500 a year.”

But the whole point of Obamacare was supposed to be to cover the uninsured. The president himself set the standard — giving Americans “access to health care for the first time” — by which Obamacare should be judged. So hold him to that standard, and ignore the hyped-up numbers touting how many people “sign up” for Obamacare.

What matters is how many of those who actually enroll were previously uninsured.

Who Refused to Release Jonathon Pollard?

Posted on March 31, 2014April 1, 2014 by Denise Simon

Update (4-1-2014)

In an effort to continue talks between Israel and the Palestinians, Israel has demanded for years the release of Pollard. There is some chatter now that his freedom could come within two weeks. It should be noted that the United States has released and returned many spies to their home country over the years.

A file is here for your review on the Pollard case.

Currently, John Kerry is working both sides of the fence in the matter of peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians. Kerry forced Israel to release prisoners with very nasty and deadly histories while Abbas has not given up anything. It should be noted here perhaps that the Palestinian Liberation Organization was in fact an invention of the Russian KGB of which Abbas, its current leader has a deep history in Russia.

Now, one matter that Israel has asked for since the Clinton administration is the release of Jonathon Pollard now serving a life sentence for providing covert technical documents to the Israelis, of course our long-term ally in the Middle East. George Tenet advised Clinton not to release Pollard and even today, with the White House and John Kerry working against Israel on a number of major issues, the Obama administration still refuses the call by Israel to the United States to release Pollard.

November, 1998

C.I.A. CHIEF VOWED TO QUIT IF CLINTON FREED ISRAELI SPY

During the Middle East peace talks last month in Maryland, the Director of Central Intelligence told President Clinton he would resign if Mr. Clinton agreed to release the spy Jonathan Jay Pollard, according to several Administration officials.

The Director, George Tenet, who was directly involved in the peace negotiations, made his warning to President Clinton after learning that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel had made Mr. Pollard’s case a key bargaining point, officials said.

In the end Mr. Clinton turned down Mr. Netanyahu’s request, agreeing only to review the matter once again, and the dispute did not prevent the negotiators from reaching a peace agreement.

Mr. Tenet refused to comment on the matter today, as did a spokesman for the Central Intelligence Agency.

Mr. Tenet’s threat to resign was a direct reflection of the depth of anger against Mr. Pollard that lingers among American intelligence and law enforcement officials 13 years after the former Naval intelligence analyst was arrested for passing top secret documents to Israel. He is now serving a life term.

A White House spokesman, David C. Leavy, refused to comment on whether Mr. Tenet threatened to resign over Pollard. But he did say, ”At no time did the President make a decision to release Mr. Pollard.”

During the conference, at Wye, Md., Mr. Clinton had been ”impressed by the force of Mr. Netanyahu’s arguments” on the Pollard matter, Mr. Leavy said.

The President then went back to consult with his advisers, including Mr. Tenet and his national security adviser, Samuel R. Berger, and eventually decided that he could not agree to Mr. Netanyahu’s demand, Mr. Leavy added.

During the conference, at Wye, Md., Mr. Clinton had been ”impressed by the force of Mr. Netanyahu’s arguments” on the Pollard matter, Mr. Leavy said.

Mr. Clinton agreed only to review the case again, for the third time in five years. United States intelligence and law enforcement circles insist that the American spy should never be given his freedom, and dismiss the fact that he acted on behalf of a friendly nation. But the far right in Israel has made Mr. Pollard’s release a celebrated cause — and Mr. Netanyahu has raised it with the President virtually every time they have met.

During the recent talks, Mr. Netanyahu told Mr. Clinton that he needed Mr. Pollard’s release in order to win over the right wing of his coalition to the peace agreement, according to senior American officials. Mr. Clinton was open to consideration of what Mr. Netanyahu and the Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat said they needed to help sell the peace agreement to their constituencies, these officials said. The President had been considering Mr. Pollard’s release, these officials said, when Mr. Tenet spoke up. ”It was clearly on the table,” said one American official.

Officials say Mr. Tenet believed that he would lose his credibility with his rank-and-file in the intelligence community if he were to agree to Mr. Pollard’s release from his life sentence.

”He knew that he was closely associated with these peace talks — it wasn’t like he was back at headquarters — and he couldn’t distance himself from this decision,” said one American official.

Mr. Tenet’s resignation would have forced Mr. Clinton to find his fourth C.I.A. director in less than six years — making the post one of the most difficult and intractable personnel problems that has faced his Administration.

Twice Mr. Clinton has had to stand by and watch as his nominees have been forced to withdraw before being confirmed by the Senate, and twice the President has had to find alternate candidates.

Mr. Tenet, 45, who was appointed Director of Central Intelligence in 1997 after former national security adviser, Anthony Lake, withdrew his nomination during partisan Senate confirmation hearings, had pledged to remain in the job for at least four years in order to provide the agency with some stability.

Since arriving at the C.I.A.’s Langley, Va. headquarters in 1995, first as the C.I.A.’s deputy director, Mr. Tenet has worked to revive the morale of agency employees and to provide a new focus after the cold war while winning increased financing from Congress.

The Pollard case was one issue on which it was impossible for Mr. Tenet to straddle both his political and intelligence constituencies.

In fact, as soon as word leaked out that Mr. Pollard’s freedom was a bargaining chip in the Middle East talks, American law enforcement and intelligence officials went into nearly open rebellion, complaining that the President should not release someone who had committed a massive betrayal of the national security. Accepting a Pollard deal with Mr. Netanyahu would have forced Mr. Tenet to side with the White House against his own lieutenants.

”If Pollard had been released, George would have had no choice but to resign,” said one senior Congressional official involved in intelligence matters.

The anger within the intelligence community was fueled by the fact that, during the 18 months he spied for Israel in 1984 and 1985, Mr. Pollard stole more top secret documents than almost any other spy in American history.

”He stole huge amounts of intelligence, measured in cubic yards, much of it was code word,” said R. James Woolsey, former Director of Central Intelligence, who recommended that Mr. Pollard be denied clemency when his case was first reviewed by President Clinton in 1993.

He took thousands of pages of the Government’s most sensitive intelligence, including many concerning Soviet weapons-system designs that came from Russian spies recruited by the C.I.A., as well as codes and large caches of information from American spy satellites and listening posts.

Arab opponents of Israel used Russian weapons, making the information of great interest to Israel.

He betrayed some of America’s most advanced espionage technology, and handed over so many documents that his Israeli handlers had to equip a secure Washington apartment with a high-speed photocopier and photographic equipment to absorb it all.

Israel has refused to return those documents ever since, and United States intelligence officials say the lack of Israeli cooperation has made it impossible for American investigators to resolve one of the most sensitive questions raised by the Pollard case — whether any of the thousands of pages of top-secret documents he passed on might somehow have ended up in the hands of America’s enemies, including the Soviet Union.

Such an outcome would have given the enemies knowledge of what American intelligence had learned, and perhaps how.

Photos: George Tenet’s resignation would have forced the President to find his fourth C.I.A. director. (pg. A1); Jonathan Pollard during an interview earlier this year. (Associated Press)(pg. A12)

Secrecy and Protection Applied to FOIA Requests

Posted on March 31, 2014March 31, 2014 by Denise Simon

Sadly, yet once again, another tool for citizens seeking truth and or investigative journalists has been firewalled and stonewalled by government operatives.

FOIA exemptions provide ample cover for bureaucrats hiding agency secrets, transparency advocates say

Black columns run vertically down 700 pages, devoid of any information about the federal workers who spent thousands of hours doing union work while on the government payroll.

This is what the U.S. Department of Agriculture considers public disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act.

In the name of protecting employees’ privacy, USDA withheld their names, duty stations, job titles, pay grades and salaries. It even deleted names of the unions benefiting from the hours spent by these USDA workers who continued to draw full pay and benefits, courtesy of the taxpayers.

The level of secrecy is a stark example of the failings of FOIA, according to open government advocates. Agency bureaucrats are free to broadly interpret the nine exemptions in FOIA that allow them to withhold information about government employees and the documents they produce.

Interpretations vary about what information should be disclosed, despite directives from President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder that there should always be a “presumption of openness” in weighing what to release.

The only recourse against an agency determined to keep its secrets is a costly lawsuit that can drag on for years.

“There are very strong incentives for agency officers to not release data, but there aren’t any incentives on the other side to release data,” said Ginger McCall, director of the open government program at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a nonprofit group that advocates for transparency.

“There’s a real culture of secrecy within the agencies, and that is something that needs to be addressed,” McCall said.

A FOIA reform bill unanimously passed the House in February. It would put into law the presumption of transparency currently embodied in proclamations by the president and attorney general. But it would not change the FOIA exemptions that allow documents requested under FOIA to be withheld.

The USDA invoked the “personal privacy” exemption for federal employees to withhold data from the Washington Examiner.

Other FOIA exemptions cover things like national defense or foreign policy secrets, disciplinary actions, information about gas and oil wells and inter-agency memorandums.

FOIA reformers say the changes proposed in the House bill are positive, but without limiting the exemptions that can be invoked under FOIA, they are not likely to break the culture of secrecy at federal agencies.

“If we are really going to see the agencies apply the exemptions any differently we actually have to address some problems with the exemptions,” said Amy Bennett, assistant director of OpenTheGovernment, another nonprofit transparency group.

Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., a sponsor of the bill, acknowledged the problem with FOIA lies in partly in the exemptions, which are left intact in the legislation.

Issa is chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, and is co-sponsoring the FOIA bill with Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland, the ranking Democrat on the committee.

Putting the presumption favoring disclosure in the law will shift the burden to the agencies to show releasing requested information will cause specific harm, Issa said told the Examiner.

“FOIA exemptions are being abused,” Issa said. “Information should only be withheld if an agency reasonably believes it could cause specific, identifiable harm — not just because it is embarrassing or politically inconvenient.

“The bipartisan FOIA Oversight and Implementation Act will codify the ‘presumption of openness’ that the administration is fond of praising but does not practice,” Issa said.

“Along with other reforms that will improve agency compliance with FOIA, the ‘presumption of openness’ will combat the high number of inappropriate or unjustified redactions that prevent transparency,” he said.

In November 2012, the Examiner filed FOIA requests with 17 of the largest federal agencies seeking information about employees released from their regular jobs to do union work under “official time.”

The 3.4 million hours spent by union representatives cost taxpayers about $155.6 million in 2011, the latest year for which figures are available from the Office of Personnel Management.

The Examiner sought the name, title, duty station, pay grade, salary and hours spent for each agency employee released on official time, as well as the name of the union that benefited. None of that information is in the annual OPM report.

Several large agencies, including USDA, were unable to comply. The Examiner published a four-part series, “Too Big to Manage,” in February.

Most of the agencies that provided data did not invoke the privacy exemption, and released what information they had. A few, including the Department of Homeland Security, claimed the privacy exemption to withhold the names of employees, but provided the rest of the information.

The USDA finally responded to the FOIA request in mid-March 2014. FOIA Officer Alexis Graves claimed releasing employee and union data sought by the Examiner would “constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.”

Graves also said there is “minimal public interest, if any,” in the information.

The Examiner will appeal.

The USDA’s response is especially frustrating because of the lack of information available on the use of official time, said Rep. Dennis Ross, R-Fla., sponsor of a bill to mandate annual disclosure of basic information about the program.

Ross is pressuring OPM to update its latest report showing data from 2011.

“If these agencies, and the USDA in particular, have nothing to hide, then they should have no problem providing timely information on how their employees spend their time during work hours,” Ross said.

By releasing bits of irrelevant information, USDA officials will be able to claim in their annual FOIA tracking reports that they made a partial release to the Examiner, rather than an outright denial, McCall said.

“They do it to game the stats,” she said.

The wide range of responses to the Examiner request, from full disclosure to the USDA’s redactions, shows there is no consistency in how FOIA officers interpret the exemptions, said John Wonderlich, policy director at the Sunlight Foundation.

“That suggests the biggest variable in FOIA is agency willingness to comply,” Wonderlich said. “That’s not what it’s supposed to be.”

The proclamation of openness by Obama on his first full day in office is similar to declarations made by previous presidents, transparency advocates say.

But like other presidents, Obama has failed to break the secretive culture within federal bureaucracy and has adopted his own practices and policies that limit the release of information he sees fit to keep secret, they say.

An investigation by the Associated Press published March 16 found the Obama administration in 2013 censored government files or outright denied access to them under FOIA more often than ever .

The administration cited more legal exceptions it said justified withholding materials and refused a record number of times to turn over files quickly that might be especially newsworthy, the AP analysis found.

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