A district federal judge ordered the Obama administration to release a foreign policy document that the administration had tried to withhold from the public even though it was unclassified and widely circulated within the executive branch. (McClatchy DC, December 18, 2013, by Michael Doyle)
“The government appears to adopt the cavalier attitude that the President should be permitted to convey orders throughout the Executive Branch without public oversight– to engage in what is in effect governance by ‘secret law’,” Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle wrote in her December 17 opinion.
“The Court finds equally troubling the government’s complementary suggestion that ‘effective’ governance requires that a President’s substantive and non-classified directives to Executive Branch agencies remain concealed from public scrutiny,” she wrote. (Secrecy, December 18, 2013, by Steven Aftergood)