Ok I agree it is very suspicious that Congress suddenly got their shit together for this one thing. But people keep doomposting this bill without actually reading it. And it deserves to be read in all the beautiful airtight glory that it is.
Massie and Khanna anticipated every single excuse DOJ normally uses to bury sensitive records, and they wrote the law to shut all of them down. To be clear, the DOJ will still try to hide, but it’s going to fail.
Here’s what the bill actually does:
They can’t hide anything for “embarrassment,” “reputational harm,” or “political sensitivity.”
That’s an explicit statutory ban. No shielding Trump, Clinton, Gates, etc. The law literally forbids it.
The argument of “Everything will suddenly be classified!” doesn’t work either.
The bill forces DOJ to declassify to the maximum extent possible and if anything stays classified, they must publish a public unclassified summary for each redaction.
That’s not optional.
“New investigations” don’t block release.
The “active investigation” exception is temporary, narrow, document-specific, and requires a written public justification in the Federal Register.
You can’t just open a random investigation and hide whole categories of documents under this bill.
The best part? Congress still gets the full list of names.
No matter what gets redacted publicly, DOJ must give Congress an unredacted list of every government official and politically exposed person named in the files. No exceptions. Not for classification. Not for investigations. Not for national security.
And enforcement is real. This is a mandatory “shall release” statute. If DOJ drags its feet, it goes straight to D.C. District Court, which has zero patience for agencies abusing secrecy laws.
This isn’t a symbolic transparency bill. It’s one of the tightest, most loophole-proof disclosure laws Congress has ever passed — which is exactly why all of their objections on the GOP side were never successful or just weak attempts to attack a statute that defines CSAM.
People can be cynical all day, but the text is the text.
And the text is a brick wall against the usual bullshit.
What do you make of this?
Since when has this administration ever followed the law?
Hopeful. Time will tell.
It’s slop. Read the bill for yourself to decide what you think of it.