Obama's taken a "Parthian shot" at the notion of accountable governance.  He rode out the door, his legacy concerns trumping the empty pledges of accountability and transparency.

The adoring crowd will turn their heads to these facts, for to notice and become aware is to also come to grips with having been deceived.  That is a most uncomfortable exercise for the Obama supporter.

Do Obama backers feel betrayed by his pledge to be" the most transparent administration in history"?  Not likely.  Do they remember?  Same answer.

The Associated Press reports:

WASHINGTON (AP) – The Obama administration in its final year in office spent a record $36.2 million on legal costs defending its refusal to turn over federal records under the Freedom of Information Act, according to an Associated Press analysis of new U.S. data that also showed poor performance in other categories measuring transparency in government.

For a second consecutive year, the Obama administration set a record for times federal employees told citizens, journalists and others that despite searching they couldn't find a single page of files that were requested.

And it set records for outright denial of access to files, refusing to quickly consider requests described as especially newsworthy, and forcing people to pay for records who had asked the government to waive search and copy fees. ...

The figures reflect the final struggles of the Obama administration during the 2016 election to meet President Barack Obama's pledge that it was "the most transparent administration in history," despite wide recognition of serious problems coping with requests under the information law. It received a record 788,769 requests for files last year and spent a record $478 million answering them and employed 4,263 full-time FOIA employees across more than 100 federal departments and agencies. That was higher by 142 such employees the previous year. ...

Under the records law, citizens and foreigners can compel the U.S. government to turn over copies of federal records for zero or little cost. Anyone who seeks information through the law is generally supposed to get it unless disclosure would hurt national security, violate personal privacy or expose business secrets or confidential decision-making in certain areas.

As to the final AP paragraph, apparently not.  Transparency pledges get you elected.  Transparency performance goes unnoticed by the sycophants.

So to all those who complain about the cost of investigations and the wasting of taxpayer money to conduct hearings and expose miscreants in our government, I ask, "What of this money spent" – this money to block and fog the disinfectant qualities of sunlight?  And to the idea that everything has its price, it seems we have yet to find the price that must be extracted from the taxpayer to get the truth out of our government.