A federal judge last week excoriated the State Department for sitting on Hillary Clinton’s emails, ordering it to release batches every 30 days. The State Department deserved the rebuke, but then it is merely following the rules laid down by the least transparent Administration in history.

The House Oversight Committee on Tuesday began a two-day hearing into the extraordinary ways the Obama Administration keeps undermining the Freedom of Information Act. Enacted in 1966, FOIA allows anyone to request information about any matter from a federal agency. The agency has 20 business days to respond (10 more in unusual circumstances), and the bar is set deliberately high for what government may withhold or redact.

Most Administrations play games with FOIA, but the Obama White House has turned stonewalling into an art form. A favorite tactic is to ignore or string out the requests. That’s what State did in Mrs. Clinton’s case, claiming it simply couldn’t get around to issuing her emails until next year. A court order was needed to get it to move, and that’s typical across the Administration.

FOIA request backlogs have more than doubled since President Obama took office. The feds received 714,231 FOIA requests in fiscal 2014, and nearly 160,000 weren’t processed within the legal time limit, up 67% from fiscal 2013.

Another trick is to impose sky-high fees. Under FOIA, certain groups (media, educational) are exempt from most fees, so agencies have taken to denying them their legitimate categorizations. The Department of Homeland Security is currently in court for having denied a research institute at Syracuse University educational status, which could cost the institute more than $100,000 for a FOIA request.