Stonewaller-in-Chief

We’re transparent, but don’t ask for any documents, says the Obama White House.

The most valuable lesson I’ve learned in reporting about Washington is a simple one: watch what politicians do, not what they say. There can be no better illustration of this than Obama’s summit meeting with African leaders last week. He used the meeting as an opportunity to tout the positive role inspectors general can play in fighting corruption in government agencies; at the same time that he was speechifying about this, some two-thirds of President Obama’s own inspectors general wrote a scathing letter to Congress complaining that his administration was placing “serious limitations” on their ability to do their jobs.

Vice President Joe Biden told the African leaders just last Monday that there is “a need to have in every government agency what we in the United States call, and it could be different in every country, we call it an inspector general.” He went on to describe an IG as “someone who is able to roam through every department, like here in the United States, the Defense Department, the IRS, the Treasury Department writ large, the Department of Interior, to be able to look at the books, to be able to look at everything that’s transpired with independent eyes — people who cannot be fired.” He concluded that “widespread corruption is an affront to the dignity of people and a direct threat to each of your nations’ stability.”

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