The agency’s actions “seem in practical rebellion against President Obama’s 2009 open-government orders,” said Tom Blanton, director of the Archive.

The Archive said the department, among other things, engaged in “selective and abusive prosecutions of espionage laws against whistleblowers as ostensible ‘leakers’ of classified information” and conducted “more ‘leaks’ prosecutions in the last three years than in all previous years combined,” while experts say “over-classification” of government documents is endemic.

There were a number of positive moves by Justice, the Archive said, but these were “outweighed by backsliding in the key indicator” of increased use of the exemption in the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) for documents that might reveal too much of the “deliberative process” — that is, who actually advocated or opposed a policy — before it was announced. Justice used it to withhold information 1,500 times in 2011, up from 1,231 in 2010.

(Well, maybe they’re deliberating more these days?)

The Archive also cited what it called a “pit bull” lawyer at the department (isn’t this usually a compliment?) for doggedly pursuing New York Times reporter James Risen and a CIA whistleblower.

Another Justice lawyer argued at the Supreme Court last year that claims of an exemption from FOIA should be given a broad reading.

Justice Antonin Scalia ventured that the high court’s prior opinions “assert, do they not, that exceptions to FOIA should be narrowly construed?”

“We do not embrace that principle,” the lawyer replied.

And Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), at a hearing, told another department official that “if we’re doing the same thing after 2¹ / ₂ years of this administration, the same as we’ve been doing for 20 years, the president’s benchmark isn’t being followed by the people he appoints.”

The Archive cited “other worthy finalists,” such as the U.S. Central Command, which “took an unclassified report, reported by the Wall Street Journal,” about Afghan army soldiers attacking U.S. troops and “classified the document at the SECRET level (serious damage to national security).”

This, the Archive said, drew even more attention to the report, which stayed on the Internet in its original, unclassified form.

The award, a framed photo of the wondrous Woods Stretch, will be sent to Attorney General Eric Holder and other individual department winners.

A passport to fun

Who can forget the Great Passport Debacle of 2007 — when it was taking more than three months to get a passport, ruining many summer vacations and causing near-riots?