When journalists uncovered a bungled social media project designed to destabilize the Cuban government, US officials relied on the State Department’s poor transparency record to dodge future questions about the program.
According to emails revealed on Monday by the Associated Press, a former senior official with the US Agency for International Development (USAID) worried that the department’s scheme could be exposed by Freedom of Information Act Requests, if USAID obtained records from a private contractor involved in the Cuban ZunZuneo program.
“The risk is that it gets FOIA’d later,” Mark Lopes wrote in a 2014 email, debating whether or not to ask the private firm in charge of the operation, Creative Associates, to hand over records to department officials being hounded by reporters for more information on it.
“I say yes so we get through the next week,” Lopes concluded, noting that the public’s interest in the story may wane by the time FOIA requests are processed. “Six months from now when FOIA comes out, this will all be over?” he wrote.
ZunZuneo was the name of a US government-supported social network, a la Twitter, that was set up by USAID in 2010 to connect democracy activists in Cuba who might agitate for regime change. The AP reported that Cubans unwittingly participating in the program were detained by the Castro government. Sen. Patrick Leahy described it as a “cockamamie” idea that was “dumb, dumb, dumb,” during a 2014 hearing.
The program was later knocked for poor oversight by a State Department inspector general in Decemeber 2015.
“Mark is correct that any copies or notes would be subject to FOIA,” wrote Susan Pascocello, the agency’s deputy general counsel, in another 2014 email reported on Monday by the AP. “It would be a good idea for me or Hal to speak with the person who is going to Creative so that we can provide guidance,” she added.
AP journalist Jack Gillum reported that USAID officials realized “that the nation’s public-records law can be so slow as to border on unusable,” and so having gritty details about the story come to light wouldn’t matter, so long as this happened long after the initial story broke. Sure enough, the wire service obtained this latest batch of emails two years after it published the ZunZuneo expose.
During Monday’s White House press briefing, administration spokesperson Josh Earnest was further prodded on the matter.
“I’m just wondering how that kind of two year delay squares with the administration’s claim that it is the most transparent in history,” one reported asked at the top, adding if there were any concerns that agencies are “intentionally using delays to slow walk requests.”
“I can’t speak to the details of this particular case,” Earnest claimed. “I don’t know what merited a two year delay.”
A State Department watchdog revealed in January that the office in charge of handling FOIA requests routinely failed to respond to information seekers within a timely manner, taking “four and one-half times as long” as other federal agencies in 2014 to process “simple requests.”
One government official suggested further evasion of FOIA requests in the emails obtained by the wire service.
“AP didn’t get this through FOIA, did they? If so, maybe it’s time to hire some new redactors. They got a bit too much of an inside view,” the missive read. The sender’s name was redacted.
