Transparency News 5/31/16
National Stories
MuckRock, a website that helps journalists and others request, analyze and share public records, has been forced by a court order to remove documents. A Washington state court ordered MuckRock to remove documents after a private company filed a temporary restraining order, claiming the City of Seattle mistakenly released records that reveal the company’s trade secrets, including an audit and two-page security overview. MuckRock says the public agency that released the documents has not indicated that they were released in error, nor has the city asked that the documents be removed. The company, Landis+Gyr, which is owned by Toshiba, has also demanded that MuckRock destroy any copies of the records and help identify readers who saw them.
Poynter
The Pentagon is relying on information it won't make public to dispute an Associated Press investigation that found the military misled Congress about sexual assault cases to blunt support for Senate legislation. In a report sent Thursday to a bipartisan group of senators, the Pentagon refers to undisclosed files about several of the cases to challenge AP's findings. But the response, which faults AP for inconsistencies and misunderstandings, fails to conclusively counter the investigation.
Virginian-Pilot
A judge, called a “hater” by Donald J. Trump for his handling of a lawsuit related to the businessman’s Trump University real estate school, has ordered documents related to the case to be unsealed. Mr. Trump is fighting a lawsuit that accuses his school venture of misleading thousands of people who paid up to $35,000 for seminars to learn about Mr. Trump’s real estate investment strategies. In an order signed on Friday, Judge Gonzalo P. Curiel of United States District Court said that related materials, including Trump University procedures on dealing with students and the news media, should be unsealed.
New York Times
Editorials/Columns
Even her explanations of what happened have added to Hlllary Clinton’s honesty problem. She issued a non-apology apology last September: “At the end of the day,” she told NBC News, “I am sorry that this has been confusing to people and has raised a lot of questions, but there are answers to all these questions. ... I take responsibility and it wasn’t the best choice.” When journalists questioned that apology, a few days later, she grew defensive: “What I did was allowed,” she told the Associated Press. “It was allowed by the State Department. The State Department has confirmed that.” Finally, a few days after that she issued an actual apology in an interview with ABC: “That was a mistake. I’m sorry about that. I take responsibility. And I’m trying to be as transparent as I possibly can.” That is simply not true. This report asserts that Clinton established the private server as a way to specifically subvert the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act.
Virginian-Pilot
Brian Davison had to go to court to pry loose state data about student performance in the public schools. Now teachers are going to court to keep him from sharing it. Davison, a Loudoun County resident, sought data on student growth percentiles (SGPs), a measure of how well students progress from year to year. The Department of Education didn’t want to release it, and the Virginia Education Association didn’t want it to. But last January Richmond Circuit Court Judge Melvin Hughes rejected the argument that releasing the data would necessarily compromise student privacy. He ordered the data released, with identifying information redacted. Teachers don’t like that one bit, because data about student progress can be used to measure teacher performance.
Bart Hinkle, Richmond Times-Dispatch
