EDITORIAL

Feds stonewall Jeff Flake. What else is new?

Editorial board
The Republic | azcentral.com

Sen. Jeff Flake’s request was simple and straightforward. He wanted contracts, statements of work and marketing plans between the Department of Defense and professional sports leagues.

U.S. Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz. won't get answers about paid military salutes until at least next year.

RELATED: Flake wants answers on paid military salutes at games

Two months later, the Pentagon responded: It didn’t have those documents handy but should be able to deliver them by next March.

Anyone who has ever sent a Freedom of Information Act request to the federal government was flabbergasted. Flake had a response in just two months!? That’s amazingly fast.

That the request was completely nonresponsive? No surprise there. The feds do not easily part with information, especially when it might be embarrassing. And the documents Flake wants will leave a tarnish.

The military has been paying sports teams to salute the military. Those hometown hero events are not shows of pure patriotism, but paid promotional spots. Flake diplomatically calls that “disappointing”; we would offer “insulting” or something earthier.

The same terms apply to Acting Under Secretary of Defense Brad Carson’s response to Flake’s request for information. The senator was asking for basic information, the sort of stuff that should take no more than a couple of key strokes to pull up. As Flake has since noted, his staff was able to uncover some contract information through simple searches of government websites.

Flake isn’t giving up. He pressed again this week, more insistently, for the contract information. We hope he gets it. At the very least, his attention to this issue should ensure than any future professional sports salute to the military is sincere, and not driven by money.

But once Flake gets the information, we hope he’ll also recognize he’s hardly alone in being stonewalled. A Freedom of Information request delayed for years is in essence a request denied. The law needs enough teeth to mean something.