There has been growing—and understandable—frustration among Democrats with Merrick Garland’s Justice Department in recent weeks. He’s not acting as Joe Biden’s personal attorney and fixer, as William Barr did for Donald Trump. He’s promising to fight for voting rights rather than working to sow doubt in the electoral process, like his predecessor. But Biden’s attorney general has maintained a maddening continuity from Barr’s DOJ, going to bat for the former administration to keep secret a memo used to clear Trump in Robert Mueller’s Russia probe and to protect the ex-president against a lawsuit by writer E. Jean Carroll, who accused him of rape.
Those moves have provoked some righteous consternation, but it turns out the DOJ isn’t the only Biden agency to defend Trump-era positions. According to the Washington Post, the General Services Administration is trying to keep a tight grip on documents Democrats are seeking in their probe into Trump’s Washington, D.C. hotel, holding back some of the material from congressional investigators and seeking to keep it from becoming public.
“These materials contain trade secrets or confidential commercial or financial information that is exempt from public release under the Freedom of Information Act or other applicable laws or regulations,” Gianelle E. Rivera, GSA associate administrator, wrote in a letter to lawmakers, according to the Post. “Therefore, you must not copy, share, distribute, or otherwise disclose the information in any manner, without prior coordination and approval from GSA.”
Trump’s D.C. hotel, in the Old Post Office building on Pennsylvania Avenue, has long been a target of investigations from Democratic lawmakers, who have sought to determine whether he was using the government-leased operation to profit off his presidency. But the GSA under Trump refused to cooperate. “If GSA insists on stonewalling our legitimate requests for documents,” Representative Carolyn Maloney, now chair of the House Oversight Committee, said in 2017, “we are determined to fight for them.”
The fight, it appears, is not over just because Trump is out of office. “The committee has an ongoing, pressing need for these materials and is continuing to seek them from GSA,” a Maloney representative told the Post. Some materials, including hotel financial statements, have been released to lawmakers, and a spokesperson for Representative Peter DeFazio, chair of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, told the paper that the Biden team has been “far more cooperative” than Trump’s. But that’s not a high bar to clear, and watchdogs are frustrated with the GSA and DOJ’s “trend of making decisions toward secrecy and away from accountability” for the previous administration. “I hope,” Noah Bookbinder, president of the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, told the Post, “that they don’t continue to go in that direction.”
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