Fifty years after President Lyndon Johnson signed the Freedom of Information Act, the Justice Department congratulates itself on success.

I missed it, and maybe you did, too, but Sunshine Week 2016 was held March 13 to 19, 2016, where the government celebrated their success in opening records to the public.  The Department of Justice is the lead agency for the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), and its agents are proud of their accomplishments.  You can watch a slick 12-minute video commemorating the 50th anniversary of  FOIA, where Justice officials pat themselves on their backs.  (I rate the video a 9 out of 10 on the laugh meter: I would have awarded a 10, but they seem to actually believe what they say.)

The video starts with Acting Associate Attorney General Stewart Delery praising Obama:

President Obama has emphasized the importance of FOIA throughout his administration.

The video then cuts to Obama in 2009 stating:

The way to make government responsible is to hold it accountable. The way to make it accountable is to make it transparent so the American people can know exactly what decisions are being made, how they are being made and whether their interests are being well served. The Freedom of Information Act is perhaps the most powerful instrument we have for making our government honest and transparent.

I probably missed this celebration of transparency, since I was likely reading about the efforts of Judicial Watch to pry Hillary's emails out of the stonewalling State Department by filing a lawsuit.  Or I might have been studying the efforts of Tea Party groups to obtain emails from the IRS over their profiling of conservative groups and denying them due process.  Or perhaps I was too busy contemplating the sheer arrogance of the Drug Enforcement Agency and the Department of Justice over their claim of executive privilege in the Fast and Furious case.  Then there is the host of other federal agencies like the EPA who are anything but transparent.  Yes, I have been too busy to have noticed the tremendous strides our federal bureaucracy has made in transparency.

Perhaps American Thinker readers have some personal stories to tell about how the U.S. government has truly fulfilled Obama’s promise of making sure their “interests are being well served.”