The Obama administration, in its
waning days, is busily destroying public records to protect its image, charged
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
“Past administrations of both
Democrat and Republican players have engaged in mass destruction of records as
they left office,” Assange said in a livestreamed press
conference Monday. “We are told that destruction of records is occurring now in
different parts of the Obama administration in different departments or
agencies.”
“One understands the political
motivation for it,” he explained, “but to eliminate small political risks by
destroying major elements of history is, frankly, an obscenity.” One needn’t go far back in history
to find examples of administrations that “lost”
or destroyed documents or e-mails, often those with political implications.
The most famous recent example, of
course, is Hillary Clinton, who maintained a private, unsecured e-mail server
while serving as President Barack Obama’s secretary of state and did not turn
it over to the government for archiving after leaving office.
Obama later lied about his knowledge of this server, the existence of
which enabled Clinton to withhold documents related to
the Benghazi debacle from congressional investigators.
The Obama administration also destroyed all e-mails related to the
operation that culminated in the alleged death of Osama bin Laden.
The George W. Bush administration,
which destroyed videos documenting the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA)
torture of detainees, claimed to have lost some 22 million e-mails over the
course of six years, including all e-mails from the office of Vice President
Dick Cheney during certain periods. In reality, the administration “had simply
shut down the Clinton [administration’s] automatic e-mail archive,” supposedly
because of a server switch, wrote Newsweek.
The Clinton administration, Newsweek explained, had set up the archive in the
wake of a lawsuit “that prevented 6,000 White House e-mail backup tapes from
being erased” near the end of the George H.W. Bush administration. That
administration, like the Reagan administration (which installed the first White
House e-mail system) before it, did not maintain e-mail archives despite the
1978 Presidential Records Act’s mandate that all presidential and vice
presidential records be preserved. A large number of executive branch e-mails
the Bush administration sent about 200 million were, therefore, lost to
posterity, undoubtedly saving certain Reagan and Bush administration figures
from embarrassment, and possibly legal action, in their retirement.
This is not to say the Clinton
administration was a model of records preservation. Numerous documents related
to the Whitewater investigation were later found in the personal residence of
the Clinton White House. And unlike Reagan — who also got key documents related
to the Iran-Contra affair shredded while he was in office and the two
Presidents Bush, Bill Clinton has managed to get records destroyed or
disappeared even after leaving office.
In 2003, Clinton’s national security
adviser, Sandy Berger, smuggled five terrorism-related classified documents out
of the National Archives and destroyed them, for which he was fined $50,000 and
sentenced to five years’ probation.
Last year, it emerged that documents
related to the probe by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) into the
death of Clinton’s Deputy White House Counsel Vince Foster had vanished from the National Archives, as
had a two-terabyte hard drive from
the Clinton administration.
Given all this, it would hardly be
surprising to discover that Obama, despite his promise of the “most
transparent” administration in history, was, as Assange asserts, even now
trying to cover his tracks by destroying documents. Contrary to the repeated
claims of Obama’s supporters, his administration did have plenty of scandals that he
would surely like to forget and probably some that he hopes never come to
light.
“Our philosophy is that such
information [presidential records] is a part of history. It belongs, legally
and philosophically, to the American people and more broadly, insofar as the
United States interacts with the world, it belongs to the people of the world,”
Assange said. “It is part of human history, and the destruction of major
archives of human history, frankly, should be formally listed as a crime
against humanity because those archives belong to humanity.”
WikiLeaks is offering a $30,000
reward for information leading to the arrest or exposure of any Obama
administration figures involved in the destruction of documents. Assange urged
“system administrators in the Obama administration” to “take the data now” and
then give it to “WikiLeaks or other journalists at your leisure.” “Get hold of that history and
protect it,” Assange said, “because that is something that belongs to humanity
and does not belong to a political party.”
http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/crime/item/25113-assange-obama-administration-destroying-documents-in-final-days
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