FOIA

The Freedom of Information Act known as FOIA was enacted in 1966 and has been used many times to get information from government records but I never realized how powerful it was until this week. A private group seeking information about the Benghazi Embassy murders requested and received documents, one of which was an email from a White House official emphasizing that the riots were caused by a film. To underscore that these protest are rooted in an Internet film and not a broader failure of policy. What is startling about this is that congress requested this information but it was either not given or redacted from the documents. This tells me that FOIA has more power than congress.