White House shields details of who visits
Dismissing standard of transparency draws fire from government watchdog groups
The White House announces Friday that it would cut public access to visitor logs revealing who is entering the White House complex, breaking with past practice and returning a cloak of secrecy over the day-to-day workings of the administration.
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — The White House announced Friday that it would cut off public access to visitor logs revealing who is entering the White House complex, breaking with past practice and returning a cloak of secrecy over the basic day-to-day workings of the administration.
The decision reverses a move by the Obama administration, which released more than 6 million White House visitor records, even as it fought successfully in federal court to keep some of the information secret. It followed months of speculation over how President Donald Trump, who has rejected basic standards of presidential transparency — including the release of his tax returns — would handle the matter of revealing who comes and goes at the White House.
‘National security risks’
White House officials, some of whom conceded privately that the decision would be controversial, said the visitor logs were being withheld for national security reasons. They said they were relying on the same legal rationale espoused by the Obama administration in arguing that the logs were essentially “presidential records,” and therefore not subject to public disclosure.
“Given the grave national security risks and privacy concerns of the hundreds of thousands of visitors annually, the White House Office will disclose Secret Service logs as outlined under the Freedom of Information Act, a position the Obama White House successfully defended in federal court,” said Mike Dubke, the White House communications director.
The new policy drew scathing criticism from government watchdog groups, some of which filed suit against the Trump administration earlier this week to obtain the records. On Friday, they said the policy was the latest example of Trump’s efforts to shield his activities and those of his administration from public view.
“From dismissing decades of tradition by declining to release his tax returns to refusing to place his assets in a blind trust, President Trump seems to be going out of his way to fan distrust and doubt about the way his White House works,” said Meredith McGehee, chief of policy at Issue One, which lobbies to reduce the influence of money in politics.
Although a federal court ruled in 2011 that visitor logs could be kept secret, the Obama administration voluntarily provided them.
Lawyers still exercised what they maintained was a right to omit some log entries, including in cases of highly sensitive meetings such as interviews for prospective Supreme Court candidates. And the Obamas left out the names of celebrities and top donors who came to personal events at the White House, such as star-studded birthday celebrations for the president and his wife.
Unavailable for 5 years
The Trump policy effectively means that none of the White House visitor logs will be available for at least five years. Under the Presidential Records Act, the public can gain access to records starting five years after the end of an administration, although the president may seek to keep them secret for up to 12 years.
It marked another turnabout for Trump after a week of reversals on domestic and foreign policy. In a 2012 posting on Twitter, he chided President Barack Obama for failing to release records that his predecessor had. “Hiding something?” he wrote.
The issue of White House visitor logs took on added significance last month after Rep. Devin Nunes of California, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said he had seen evidence that Trump or his closest associates might have been “incidentally” swept up in foreign surveillance by U.S. spy agencies. It was later revealed that two White House aides had given Nunes the intelligence leading him to make that claim during a nighttime meeting on White House grounds.
The visitor records, maintained by the Secret Service, list the names of those entering along with which member of the White House staff obtained permission for them to enter, and the name of the person they were to meet.