The only person in the United States who can get advance Game of Thrones screeners for season six is President Obama. This is because “he’s the leader of the free world,” as one of the co-creators puts it. One journalist is so distraught at not finding out if Jon Snow is really dead before everyone else that she’s actually filed a Freedom of Information Act request to get Obama to share his screeners with the public.
Vanessa Golembewski writes for Refinery 29 that she filed a FOIA request to test the law’s limits: “If the president — and by extension, our government — is in possession of a file, surely that file is subject to my request to see it as a U.S. citizen.” In the next paragraph, she concedes that perhaps the screeners are probably are not subject to FOIA, since she doesn’t know where they fall into “the grey area that is personal property of a government figure.” So that probably makes this whole exercise pointless, if it weren’t kind of silly and pointless already.
But Golembewski has some good reasoning for the scenario that President Obama will leak the screeners, even if he doesn’t have to:
Obama’s in his IDGAF years, in which he’s joining Marc Maron for his podcast and running wild with Bear Grylls. Perhaps, in one of his final cool-president moves, he will thoroughly recap the first couple episodes of GoT in a vlog or something.
Hopefully, he’ll start vlogging after Game of Thrones’ premiere date. Otherwise that would be pretty rude to the creators.
(via Refinery 29)