Two years ago, President Barack Obama claimed that his was “the most transparent administration in history.”

We are reminded of that claim as the American Society of Newspaper Editors marks the 10th anniversary of Sunshine Week, which is set aside each year to remind the American public of the importance of open government and the freedom of information.

Sunshine Week 2015 — which coincides with the birthday of James Madison, drafter of the First Amendment — occurs this year as the issue of transparency is front and center in the nation’s capital.

Hillary Clinton last week held a news conference during which she acknowledged — two years after the fact — that she maintained a secret nongovernmental email account during her tenure as Obama’s secretary of state.

While Clinton feigned transparency — declaring that she turned over tens of thousands of emails to the State Department, and suggesting that the emails will be made public at some unspecified time — she glossed over the fact that her staff deleted tens of thousands of emails the former secretary of state deemed strictly personal.

Meanwhile, the Associated Press last week filed a lawsuit against the State Department, attempting to force release of Clinton’s off-book emails after several failed attempts to obtain them under the Freedom of Information Act.

State Department spokesperson Alec Gerlach said that State “does its best to meet its FOIA responsibilities,” but that timely fulfillment of legal requirements under FOIA depends on “the complexity of the request.”

Then there was the lawsuit filed last week by the Competitive Enterprise Institute against the Environmental Protection Agency for “slow-walking” its 2012 FOIA request for the surreptitious emails of then-EPA administrator Lisa Jackson.

Jackson’s email scandal may be even worse than Clinton’s. Indeed, she set up an email account in the name of “Richard Windsor,” a fictitious employee. She used the account to communicate with high-level Obama administration officials, as well as also to secretly coordinate with outside environmental groups.

EPA said CEI’s “Windsor” request required processing of some 120,000 records at a pace of 100 records a month. At that rate, CEI complained, it’s FOIA request will take 100 years to be fulfilled.

Such are the obfuscatory actions of an administration that President Obama claimed to be the most transparent in history. And the American people would be none the wiser were it not for the Fourth Estate, which, as our friends at the AP aptly put it, is the “proxy for the people.”

— Orange County (Calif.) Register