Groups Sue DHS For Not Releasing White House Visitor Logs
A group of nonprofit organizations sued the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on Monday for not releasing details of visitor logs of the White House. Currently, the White House website page at which visitor logs were made available, says: "This page is being updated. It will post records of White House visitors on an ongoing basis, once they become available."
The lawsuit was filed by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), the National Security Archive and the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). It accused the DHS of failing to disclose records of visits to the White House and to President Donald Trump at his Mar-a-Lago and Trump Tower residences. The complaint said that the Secret Service, a part of DHS, which maintains White House visitor logs, violated the law by not providing information for visitors to the White House, Trump Tower in Manhattan, and the Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida.
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“We hoped that the Trump administration would follow the precedent of the Obama administration and continue to release visitor logs, but unfortunately they have not,” CREW Executive Director Noah Bookbinder said in a statement. “Given the many issues we have already seen in this White House with conflicts of interest, outside influence, and potential ethics violations, transparency is more important than ever, so we had no choice but to sue."
Trump has hosted several world leaders at his Mar-a-Lago residence, the most recent one being the Chinese President Xi Jinping.
A similar litigation by CREW was made in 2009 against the administration of former President Barack Obama for not disclosing White House visitor logs. After the lawsuit, Obama's administration became the first to routinely release logs of White House visits. It eventually disclosed about 6 million visits at the White House complex, reports said.
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