Bill Dedman Quotes

On taking office, Obama promised the 'most transparent' administration in history; yet his record as president has been anything but transparent.

Groups that advocate open government have argued that it's vital to know the names of White House visitors, who may have an outsized influence on policy matters.

In 1971, near the middle of Nixon's first term, he approved a plan to install a White House taping system as a way of preserving an accurate chronicle of important discussions and decisions. Except for Nixon, three aides, and the Secret Service, no one knew about the listening devices.

Given the pervasive secrecy of the Bush-Cheney administration, and the sorry consequences of that disposition, President Barack Obama's early emphasis on openness in government seems almost inevitable.

Why does the White House sometimes seem so determined to close the door on the people's right to know what their government is doing?

People in power tend to be not as enthusiastic about open records as they were before they came to power.

The public has every right to see Robert S. Mueller III's conclusions. Absolutely nothing in the law or the regulations prevents the report from becoming public. Indeed, the relevant sources of law give Attorney General P. William Barr all the latitude in the world to make it public.

Obama's openness is a welcome change from his predecessor, who went all the way to the Supreme Court to hide the RSVP list for a single policy meeting. And transparency is intrinsically good, since in a democracy, very little government activity is legitimately secret.

The White House again refused to turn over discussions Vice President Cheney had with Enron officials over energy policy. Cheney said if he had to disclose every time some business donated a ton of money then came in to write its own policy to govern itself, he wouldn't get any work done.

The funny thing is that Dick Cheney has done more than anybody in the White House for quite a long time to throw up roadblocks against future historians.

There is no method by which an average citizen can effectively fight the White House in the media.

We should be able to go to our government and get clear answers.

People don't realize that the Obama Administration has been, if anything, harder on whistleblowers than the Bush Administration. Part of the reason is that they know that the response will be more muted because the traditional constituency supporting whistleblowers just happen to be the same constituency as Obama's.

Every president thinks that all information that comes to the White House is their private preserve after they all promise an open administration on the campaign trail, but some are more secretive than others. Some want to lock down everything.

Access to presidential materials should be as wide as possible.

State courts usually rule that correspondence between government officials, about government business, are public records, whether they use their government e-mail accounts or private ones.

I think what we ought to be focusing on is that we are on path for the release of 75,000 pages of documents in connection with John Roberts' work in the White House, as in the counselor's office and as his time working as an assistant in the office of the attorney general.

If government were a product, selling it would be illegal.

I introduced the Transparency in Government Act, a multi-faceted transparency bill that would bring unprecedented access and accountability to the federal government.

Many state parole boards claim exemptions from state sunshine laws that would be unthinkable for other government officials.

There is a veil of secrecy that is descending around the administration which I think is unseemly

Even more shocking is a proposal to create a new biodefense research agency that would be completely exempt from FOIA ...We can all agree that the nation must prepare, but it should not do so in abject secrecy

It’s hard to sometimes get information out of the government. It’s really hard. You can’t do it without asking tough questions.

It appears to the American people that the government is intent on prying into every nook and cranny of people’s private lives, while at the same time doing all that it can to block access to government information that would inform the American people what is being done in their name.

The biggest polluters have a back door into the policy making process of the White House.