'The most transparent administration in history': a campaign promise becomes a punchline.

• Author: Ciaramella, C.J.
• Position: CIVIL LIBERTIES

ON HIS FIRST day in office, President Barack Obama pledged to run "the most transparent administration in history." As he prepares to move out of the White House, the phrase will probably be remembered as a sarcastic punchline.

It was hard not to snicker when one of the beleaguered White House press secretaries would stand in front of the journalist corps and claim that the executive branch was blazing new trails in openness. Despite some promising open data initiatives, the executive branch under Obama was, on the whole, more secretive than ever. Since 2009, press access to the White House has been notably restricted, whistleblower prosecutions have spiked, and Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuits against the federal government have reached an all-time high.

In 2013, the Committee to Protect Journalists published a scathing report, written by former Washington Post editor Leonard Downie Jr., on the Obama administration's obsession with controlling media coverage and burnishing its image, drawing comparisons to the pathological tendencies of one of the White House's previous occupants.

"The Obama administration's aggressive war on leaks, and its determined efforts to control information that the news media needs to hold the government accountable for its actions, are without equal since the Nixon administration and in direct conflict with President Obama's often-stated goal of making his administration the most transparent in American history," Downie said when the document was released. "Parenthetically, I'm old enough that I was one of the editors on the Watergate story, so I make that comparison with knowledge," he continued.

But unlike Tricky Dick, who provided future presidents with a cautionary tale about how dirty tricks can come back to bite them, Obama leaves a blueprint on how to suppress information and get away with it.

The most immediate change was a sudden clampdown on unauthorized comments and interviews. The Obama administration made sure the word got out: The only people who talk to journalists are public affairs officers. In 2014, 38 national press organizations and transparency groups--including Investigative Reporters and Editors, the Society of Professional Journalists, and the Poynter Institute--called on him to end "politically driven suppression of news and information about federal agencies."

"Over the past two decades, public...