Jeb Hensarling, chair of the House financial services committee, tells agencies to exclude communications from journalists’ freedom of information requests

This article is more than 3 years old

This article is more than 3 years old

A House Republican chairman has told a dozen government agencies to exclude communications with his committee from requests made by news organizations, advocacy groups and others through the Freedom of Information Act.

The publication this week of a letter sent by Jeb Hensarling, the House financial services committee chair, to the treasury secretary, Steve Mnuchin, prompted the senior Democrat on the committee to say: “People should ask themselves: ‘What is he trying to hide?’”

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In response, a committee spokesman said “liberal outrage” over the letter was “just performance art”.

Records and material from the executive branch are subject to requests under the 1967 Freedom of Information Act. Congress, which wrote the law, is exempt.

In the published letter, Hensarling said communications agencies had with members of his panel and staff should not be released, arguing that such communications often included sensitive and confidential information.

“All such documents and communications constitute congressional records not ‘agency records’ for purposes of the Freedom of Information Act and remain subject to congressional control even when in the physical possession” of the agency, Hensarling wrote to Mnuchin on 3 April.

That letter was first reported by BuzzFeed. The Associated Press obtained additional letters that the Texas Republican sent to agencies within the jurisdiction of his committee, among them the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.



The top Democrat on the House financial services committee, Maxine Waters of California, said Hensarling had for years made “intrusive and aggressive demands of agencies” and cited his request of more than 150,000 pages of documents from the CFPB.

“Anytime he’s called on it, he says that Congress has the right to conduct oversight,” she said. “And while Congress does have that right, it is the height of hypocrisy for him to take such extraordinary measures to shield himself from the oversight of the American public.

“People should ask themselves: ‘What is he trying to hide?’”

The advocacy group Public Citizen said Hensarling’s letter violated the spirit of the open records law, though the legal ramifications were murkier. “What’s clear is that it’s an outrageous move,” said Robert Weissman, the group’s president.

The House financial services committee has jurisdiction over issues relating to banking, insurance, federal monetary policy, housing and international finance. On Thursday, it passed legislation rolling back much of the Dodd-Frank laws created under Barack Obama in response to the 2008 financial crisis.

Weissman said the importance of such legislation is one reason to be hypersensitive to secrecy: “We know these are not technocratic policy matters removed from broad public interest or the influence of the most powerful industry sector in America.”

Jeff Emerson, a spokesman for the House committee, said the letter to Mnuchin was simply a reminder of legal obligations. A federal appellate court recognized in 2004, he said, that records created by the treasury department at the request of Congress are not considered agency records if Congress intends to retain them.

The court has long recognized that Congress’s constitutional oversight role may be threatened, Emerson said, if agencies do not maintain the confidentiality of congressional records.

Waters had known about the letters for more than a month and failed to object publicly, he said in a statement, adding: “This newfound liberal outrage is just performance art.”