Earlier this month, Time magazine's cover story on LGBT people generally, and transgender folks in particular, referenced ambitious Democratic gay leader Chad Griffin and where his career path may lead:
"On March 32, Chad Griffin, an activist who helped lead the fight for marriage equality and is now mentioned as a possible Cabinet Secretary in a Hillary Clinton Administration, met with North Carolina's Republican Governor, Pat McCrory, who had signed the bathroom bill."
Rather curious Time omitted the Human Rights Campaign entirely and failed to note Griffen is CEO of the group, which has endorsed Clinton for president and is devoting many resources to her election effort.
Griffin, who, like Bill Clinton, hails from Hope, Arkansas, worked for the First Couple in their White House press office starting in 1993 and left a relatively large paper trail stretching up to 1995.
Two years ago, I filed a FOIA request with the William J. Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock for Griffins emails and paper correspondence, and recently received a handful of pages out of the thousands of responsive public records located.
Bottom line: If we want to inspect Griffin's paper trail from his White House years, it's going to take crowdfunding $1,800 for documents we're not sure all of which will be relevant. I'll need assistance from others establishing a GoFundMe campaign.
Can you help obtain these public files? Let's make it plain from the start of this wider effort to make Griffin as fully transparent as possible: All records from the Clinton Library will be shared online for all to read.
Latest word from the library, after they provided me with about a dozen responsive pages:
"[We're] glad you found the sample interesting. In answer to your questions . . . Of course someone could come and visit the Library in person to view the records and take pictures, as long as the flash is turned off. He or she may also bring a flatbed scanner. There is no charge for taking pictures or scans of the records, and self-service copies in the research room are $0.25/page . . . $1,800 is the best estimate of what it would cost for the Library to scan/copy the remaining records from this FOIA case. We will not have a final figure until the records have been scanned . . . Of the approximately 2,287 pages in this FOIA case, 469 pages were either withheld or redacted, leaving about 1,818 pages open with no redactions."
Got a hankering to make a donation or otherwise assist in this sunshine project targeting Griffin's email trail? Leave a comment or email or give me a ring. Here are some of the records, in chronological order:
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