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Judge: Show me Obama foreign aid order

A federal judge is demanding to see a copy of a government-wide foreign-aid-policy order President Barack Obama issued three years ago which administration lawyers have argued is protected by executive privilege.

The Obama administration acknowledges that the Presidential Policy Directive on Global Development the president signed in 2010 is unclassified, but officials have steadfastly refused to make any portion of it public, even after a watchdog group filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit for the document earlier this year. (The White House has released a fact sheet about the order.)

On Friday, U.S. District Court Judge Ellen Huvelle ordered the government to produce a copy of the directive for her review as she considers how to resolve the lawsuit brought by the Center for Effective Government, formerly known as OMB Watch.

(Also on POLITICO: GOP hits Obama the manager)

"Defendants shall produce to the Court for in camera inspection by November 15, 2013, a copy of the Presidential Policy Directive on Global Development," Huvelle wrote in her one-page order (posted here).

In the lawsuit, the Justice Department has claimed that the order is covered by executive privilege, more specifically the presidential communications privilege, even though the directive does not contain the kind of information that typically leads to such a claim—advice to the president from his top advisers.

Instead, the government lawyers say, the order amounts to instructions the president has given to senior executive branch officials and can be withheld through executive privilege on those grounds.

The legal fight over the aid order is just one of several executive privilege-related disputes making their way with through the courts at the moment and posing a challenge to Obama's promise to run the most transparent administration in history.

In the highest-profile fight, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee is pressing for documents related to the Obama administration's response to the Operation Fast and Furious gunrunning investigation. Attorney General Eric Holder was held in contempt by the House over the dispute. In the case, the Justice Department is claiming that Obama can assert executive privilege to withhold records that he never saw and which were never sent to the White House.

(Earlier on POLITICO: Fresh DOJ loss in "Fast and Furious" documents fight)

U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson recently rejected the Obama administration's argument that she has no authority to resolve the dispute or should defer from doing so. She has yet to rule on which documents are covered by the privilege.

And in a separate case, another federal judge recently rejected another watchdog group's demand for a high-level policy directive signed by President George W. Bush in 2008. The Justice Department made a similar argument that the cybersecurity order was covered by executive privilege.

U.S. District Court Judge Beryl Howell ruled last month that the document is not subject to FOIA at all, but should be considered a presidential record—even though copies of it exist in agencies across the executive branch. The case, brought by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, is not exactly parallel to the Obama aid-directive fight because portions of the cybersecurity order were classified.