By Cliff Montgomery – Jan. 8th, 2014
A federal judge in December ruled that the Obama Administration must release an unclassified presidential directive, adding that any attempt to withhold the document from the public is an illegal exercise of “secret law.”
Though the decision wasn’t mentioned much in the U.S. corporate press, D.C. District Judge Ellen Huvelle chastised the Obama White House for wrongly adopting a “limitless” interpretation of executive authority.
“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’,” stated Judge Huvelle in the December 17th 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,” added the judge.
Judge Huvelle ruled on Presidential Policy Directive (PPD) 6. That directive “is a widely-publicized, non-classified Presidential Policy Directive on issues of foreign aid and development that has been distributed broadly within the Executive Branch and used by recipient agencies to guide decision-making,” the judge pointed out.
“Even though issued as a directive, the PPD-6 carries the force of law as policy guidance to be implemented by recipient agencies, and it is the functional equivalent of an Executive Order,” added Judge Huvelle.
The court understood what was at stake in this decision.
“Never before has a court had to consider whether the [presidential communications] privilege protects from disclosure under FOIA [the Freedom of Information Act] a final, non-classified, presidential directive,” stated the judge.
The court ordered the Obama Administration to hand over a copy of PPD-6 to the Center for Effective Government, a non-profit organization which operates as a government watchdog.
The Center filed a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act to obtain a release of the directive.
