Fifteen things are redacted from the official calendar for Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin on the day last year that he visited Fort Knox and watched the eclipse with his wife, Louise Linton, according to records obtained by the Daily Beast.
The redactions from the Aug. 21, 2017, trip are just one example of the extraordinary number of items redacted from Mnuchin’s calendar according to the records reviewed by the Daily Beast.
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Within his first eight months in office, the Treasury Department has exempted items from his schedule 148 times, according to agency records, an average of 18 times per month.
That’s far more than was done for the two Treasury secretaries in the Obama administration, who had a combined 235 items redacted over eight years, according to the Daily Beast.
The Treasury Department cited Exemption 7 of the Freedom of Information Act as the reason for the redactions.
This allows, according to the Daily Beast, the redaction of information that “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.”
“Treasury follows guidance from the Justice Department, revised in 2014, to redact information about the secretary’s security detail and measures taken to protect the secretary,” a Treasury Department spokesperson said in a statement to The Daily Beast.
“Certain other aspects of the secretary’s calendars are not released publicly, including internal deliberative communications and national-security meetings or calls,” the Treasury spokesperson added.
Government watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) sued the Trump administration in March for records about Mnuchin and Linton’s trip to Kentucky.
The trip was criticized after Linton posted an Instagram photo of her leaving the government plane that included hashtags for luxurious designer fashion brands.
Craig Holman of CREW told the Daily Beast the government agency must be able to prove that Exemption 7 concealments are necessary.
“It is highly unlikely that any of these thresholds for redacting Mnuchin’s daily calendar are present,” Holman said.
“In fact, Mnuchin’s extensive and costly travel junkets — including viewing a solar eclipse [while traveling] onboard a military aircraft — strongly suggests another motive for the redactions: avoiding embarrassing public scrutiny of his costly travel jaunts at taxpayer expense,” he added.