Secret laws threaten democracy. Release the Justice Department's secret legal memos!
Petition to the Senate:
Secret memos issued by the DOJ Office of Legal Counsel helped shield Trump from legal accountability for his crimes and abuses of power. It’s time for all of the OLC’s legal memos to be made public. The DOJ OLC Transparency Act (S. 3858) was recently filed as an amendment to the FY2023 NDAA — we urge you to support this amendment to help rein in secret law and provide accountability for corrupt government officials!
A secretive legal office in the federal government helped shield Trump from legal accountability for his crimes and abuses of power.
So long as this powerful office, the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), is permitted to keep so much of its legal work secret, our democracy will be at risk. The Senate must pass legislation to increase OLC transparency.
Sign the petition: Secret laws threaten democracy. The Senate must pass the DOJ OLC Transparency Amendment to the NDAA, requiring OLC to publicly disclose all past legal opinions and any it produces moving forward!
One former employee of the Office of Legal Counsel said that her job sometimes felt like she and her OLC colleagues were “using the law to legitimize lies.”1
In recent years, OLC has released memos trying to:
- Block Congress from obtaining Trump’s tax returns and block Biden from accessing Trump’s presidential records
- Argue nepotism rules blocking government officials from hiring friends and family don’t apply to the White House
- Unconstitutionally expand the president’s power to unilaterally wage war
- Undermine gender equality, the separation of church and state, and reproductive freedoms.1,2
And those are just the ones we know about. The public has a right to know what laws are currently in place and Congress needs to be able to do its oversight job under the Constitution. That way, we can pressure our elected officials to undo the damage done by years of secrecy and rebuild our democracy.
Congress must act now to ensure these secret laws don’t undermine our democracy any further. All OLC memos must be disclosed immediately to eliminate secret law!
Sign the petition: Secret laws threaten democracy. The Senate must pass the DOJ OLC Transparency Amendment to the NDAA, requiring OLC to publicly disclose all past legal opinions and any it produces moving forward!
Sources:
- American Prospect, “Garland Has Yet to De-Trumpify His Office of Legal Counsel,” January 31, 2022.
- New York Times, “U.S. Discloses Decades of Memos on Presidential War Powers,” September 16, 2022.