The ACLU just announced it has filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to see any and all information relating to our orange-overlord.
That’s why we’re stepping in now, using FOIA — one of America’s most critical guarantors of government transparency and the central mechanism by which ordinary Americans can provide ongoing public checks and balances on elected officials in the political branches. We want to know how the Trump transition team and the government offices tasked with supervising ethics-related issues for the incoming administration have been thinking about and confronting these potential conflicts. In pursuit of that information, we’ve asked for a gamut of documents — legal opinions, policy advisories, communications, and more — that address them. And we aim to publish the responses so that the American public can do its job conducting broad-based democratic oversight of the new administration.
The many conflict-of-interest issues presented by Donald Trump’s assumption of the presidency threaten to undermine the public’s confidence in government, the global community’s trust in our nation’s chief executive, and even potentially our national security. With this FOIA — surely the first of many to come during the next four years — we hope to facilitate the public’s indispensable role in checking the power of our public officials.
The fight is on.