Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I want to address a matter relating to the nomination of Daniel Jorjani to be Solicitor at the Department of Interior. In March, I joined a bipartisan, bicameral letter to Interior raising concerns about proposed updates to its Freedom of Information Act, FOIA, regulations. These changes appeared to shift the burden of identifying the location of agency hold records from the agency to the public, set limits on requests when they involve processing a ``vast quantity of material,'' and imposed a monthly limit on the processing of records for a given requester--all of which have no identifiable basis in the FOIA statute. Since then, reports indicated other concerning FOIA policies at Interior that could result in unlawful delays of FOIA responses--policies that were in place while Mr. Jorjani served as Deputy Solicitor, with key FOIA responsibilities. Over the weekend, Interior's inspector general confirmed an investigation into the FOIA process at Interior. I look forward to reading the results of this investigation and learning more about the development of these policies. If confirmed as Solicitor at Interior, Mr. Jorjani would oversee and resolve FOIA appeals, among other critically important transparency policies. As we have seen in successive administrations, FOIA requests are often viewed as the skunk at the picnic. But the government's business is the people's business. Going forward, Mr.…”