Sarahjane Blum is the President of Property of the People, a non-profit that initiated Operation 45, a project dedicated to ensuring transparency and accountability in the Trump administration. This project uses the Freedom of Information Act and other research modes to expose governmental overreach and mismanagement. Blum holds an MA in American history from Georgetown University.
BPR: How does Operation 45 use the Freedom of Information Act to ensure government transparency?
SB: The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) says that the documents of government are the property of the people, and all anybody should have to do to access them is to ask. But in practice, the FOIA is not very user friendly. Government by and large doesn’t want to be accountable to citizens, so they use every trick they can to not give records. However, FOIA is still one of the most radically democratic parts of the whole United States government. It can be used, sometimes easily and sometimes with great difficulty, to get the records of government into the hands of public citizens, where we can decide if we like what is being done in our name.
BPR: How does Operation 45 choose what information it investigates?
SB: What we do is say, “here are the questions of public interest, so let’s take a holistic view of these questions.” To take an example, we were very interested in the question of how Trump’s business holdings present conflicts of interest. We conducted an investigation into the ways in which charge card receipts could show payments to Trump-owned enterprises. We had no idea what this was going to uncover, but we ended up uncovering the first firm example of a violation of the Domestic Emoluments Clause [which prohibits the President from receiving benefits from the government other than his compensation].
BPR: Once you get access to records, you analyze the value of the material, and then pass along the documents to journalists. How long does this three step process take?
SB: Sometimes, you get twenty pages of documents and you can read that in a day and fairly quickly realize what you are going to do. Other times you get 10,000 pages of names, or things that need a key to decode. Sometimes you may not see something on your first pass that is important, but after you get 10 other requests [for the same information], you realize you missed something. The information we are getting now might not immediately seem newsworthy, but nine months from now could easily become so.
BPR: Has the threat of fake news affected your evidence-based line of work?
SB: One thing that is really important about using FOIA as a tool is that while you can quibble about anyone’s interpretations, you cannot quibble with the documents. You can’t say this receipt doesn’t exist. So, we consider the use of FOIA to be a pretty good antidote to fake news. It is a good way to remind people how to go back to the source.