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California Assemblyman Anthony Portantino (pictured; D-La Cañada Flintridge) has won committee approval for his bill to give employees in the Legislature the same protections afforded to other state workers when they report waste, fraud and abuse. Assembly Bill 1378 will give legislators and their employees protection from retaliation for reporting "improper governmental activity." The bill provides criminal and civil liability for violations. In a recent amendment, the bill limits the right to pursue civil remedies to employees, not legislators themselves. The Sacramento Bee reports that Assemblyman Portantino suffered retaliation himself after we was the lone Democrat to vote against a budget bill.  The Speaker slashed the budget for his office staff. Thus, when Assemblyman Portantino agreed to the amendment to limit civil claims to employees only, he was giving up his own rights for the sake of his employees. The outcome: a committee vote on January 10 with 10 votes in favor and no opposition. Congratulations!

UPDATE:  On January 19, 2012, the Sacramento Bee reported that A.B. 1378 died in the Assembly's Appropriations Committee. The bill did not get the required motion and second required for consideration. The State Auditor said that the bill would cost about $400,000 a year, and would put the Auditor's office in the position of investigating its own "client." It is hard to see how the anti-retaliation provision would interfere with the "independence" of her office. And if the anti-retaliation provision ends up costing the State money, it would probably be a result of liability for actual retaliation -- showing that there is a problem to be addressed. It is not unheard of, though, for a bill for transparency and against corruption and retaliation, gets buried through a procedure that does not require legislators to generate a record of who voted yes and who voted no.  Hopefully, California voters will call on members of the Appropriations Committee to explain why they did not make the required motion and second to advance A.B. 1378.

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Truthout reporter Jason Leopold is reporting today that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) released five pages of a PowerPoint presentation that describe a previously unknown program of "blackballing" records that would not be disclosed in response to requests under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Labor historian Trevor Griffey obtained the document while following up on Manning Marable's research on Malcolm X.  Dr. Marable was a Columbia University professor who founded the Institute for Research in African-American Studies.  He died last year, and Griffey made a FOIA request to the FBI to ask for its documentation about Dr. Marable's requests about Malcolm X. An FBI analyst eventually disclosed that a search on Marable turned up a single file that was "blackballed" per the "standard operating procedure." Griffey made another request for documents about the blackballing procedure. This request produced the five pages from a PowerPoint presentation.  It says that the FBI would blackball a record if it

Would disclose techniques and procedures for law enforcement investigations or prosecutions or would disclose guidelines for law enforcement investigations or prosecutions if such disclosure could reasonably be expected to risk circumvention of the law

This text is from FOIA Exemption (b)(7)(E) [5 U.S.C. § 552(b)(7)(E)]. What is disturbing is that instead of producing a copy of the document with the classified information blacked out, the FBI was denying the existence of documents that actually do exist. The whole point of FOIA is that we can build trust and confidence in government operations through a process by which government offices share their information, with certain limited exceptions. While the government retains the right to classify certain information, or even to respond that the existence of non-existence of a document is itself classified (the so-called "Glomar response"), it undermines public confidence when it makes a false statement that no document exists. The PowerPoint pages themselves had certain portions redacted so that we in the public cannot even know all the categories of documents that are "blackballed."  Hopefully, wiser heads will soon prevail and the FBI will reform its FOIA procedures so that the public will have accurate information about when and why information is withheld.

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