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Early in his third presidential campaign, Donald Trump vowed to establish a “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” to “declassify and publish all documents on Deep State spying, censorship, and abuses of power.” The phrase “Truth and Reconciliation” recalls bodies established to investigate abuses by toppled Communist regimes such as East Germany’s, or the former apartheid government of South Africa. The framing suggests that Trump views the entire past decade, from “Russiagate” to the “lawfare” cases entangling himself and his advisers, as the fruits of an illegitimate regime that threw the rule of law out the window.
This interpretation of recent history, surely viewed as partisan by Trump’s opponents, will be tested by the facts, once they become better known and documented. But the president-elect’s suggestion that the workings of the U.S. government must be more transparent is long overdue. //
It is high time for a serious overhaul of classification procedures, with the appointment of a presidential “task force” of the kind suggested in the Classification Reform for Transparency Act (which still awaits passage). President Obama’s Executive Order 13526 of 2009 limited classification times for ordinary records to 10 years and established a cap of 25 years for more sensitive files. But the nine telltale “exemptions” were left in place, allowing security agencies to continue stonewalling — while adding massively to the vault of our nation’s secrets.
If we streamline exemptions to a few simple categories such as “sources at risk,” private data of living citizens, and military-technological and trade secrets and shorten classification to a single presidential term of four years (e.g., to prevent an opposition party from mining recent presidential files for use in election campaigns), we could exponentially reduce the expense of classification going forward and restore public trust in Washington, D.C. — not least by putting a healthy fear into our public servants that they cannot abuse their powers and get away with it.
Meanwhile, why not declassify all U.S. government files more than 25 years old? If a strict exemption threshold is met, government agencies could still redact personal data or trade or military secrets — but the files themselves should be opened. Rather than require citizens and historians to pry information out of Washington via FOIA applications, the burden of classification should be placed where it belongs — on the government.
Files should be open to the public unless otherwise specified, not secret by default. We the people have a right to know what our government does in our name, and to know our own history.