THE WHITE HOUSE
Office of the Press Secretary
_____________________________________________________________________
For Immediate Release July 21, 1998
PRESS BRIEFING
BY
MIKE MCCURRY
The Briefing Room
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Q Mike, it recently came to light that the FBI has
been exempted from the President's declassification order of three
years ago. Does the President know about this? Is he disappointed?
What's the situation?
MR. MCCURRY: The President -- I don't know whether he
directly knew about it, but obviously the White House did know about
it because of this domestic law enforcement role that the FBI plays
because of its special responsibilities to protect the integrity of
the investigative work and the privacy of American citizens. There
were exemptions granted to aspects of the declassification order.
The Attorney General requested that and did receive the waiver from
the 1995 executive order's requirements for automatic
declassification. That exemption does not mean that the records will
not be eventually declassified and, in fact, the FBI is committed to
undertaking a systematic review in order to declassify as many of
them as possible. I am told you can get further on that at FBI.
Q So he doesn't think that this is a violation of the
spirit of the --
MR. MCCURRY: He understands for law enforcement
reasons, the exemption that was granted, but the principle is the
same, which is that the government needs to move to grant greater
accessibility and encourage greater understanding across a broad
range of issues. You saw the Director of Central Intelligence
address that same issue recently and talk about how they're trying to
set some priorities there. We are going to have to keep at this,
because the task is enormous.
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Q Mike, back on the declassification issue. Just
because a document's declassified doesn't mean that it becomes
public. Can you explain why declassifying a document implicates
privacy interests?
MR. MCCURRY: I'm not sure I understand the question.
You could declassify and once it is declassified, it can be placed in
public domain. The barrier that exists normally to making things
publicly available has been declassification, particularly in the
records we are talking about.
Q Well, there are all kinds of government documents
that aren't classified that you can't get under privacy act --
MR. MCCURRY: Many of these exact records at the FBI are
of that nature; they have not been classified for national security
purposes, but they are considered law-enforcement sensitive. And
that has to do wit the nature in which the Bureau and other law
enforcement agencies maintain their records.
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