The National Archives helped in a secret program to reclassify thousands of documents that had previously been made public, and it took steps to ensure that the controversial program would remain unnoticed to avoid public criticism, The Washington Post reported this morning.
In a 2002 memorandum quoted by the Post, officials at the archives agreed to help in the reclassification program and to keep everything related to the program a secret, in order “to avoid the attention and researcher complaints that may arise from removing material that has already been available publicly from the open shelves for extended periods of time.”
The archives stopped the program last month, after a New York Times article in February disclosed that 55,000 records had been reclassified since 1999 (The Chronicle, March 3).
