Donald Trump’s administration has come under fire for an apparent lack of transparency after the White House said it won’t release visitor logs – something the Obama administration had done.
The issue:
On Friday, the Trump administration reversed an Obama-era decision to release lists of people or groups that visit the White House.
White House communications director Michael Dubke cited “grave national security risks and privacy concerns of the hundreds of thousands of visitors annually” as part of the decision.
As the Associated Press points out, the Obama administration began to release White House visitor logs after fighting attempts by Congress and liberal groups to access those records.
READ MORE: White House will not release visitor records raising transparency questions
Ultimately, nearly 6 million visitor records were released, though certain visits were excluded for national security or law enforcement reasons. That meant the records provided an incomplete account of who passed through the White House gates.
The Trump tweet:
In 2012, Trump took to Twitter to criticize Obama about not releasing documents.
“Why does Obama believe he shouldn’t comply with record releases that his predecessors did of their own volition? Hiding something?” Trump tweeted.
On Monday, White house spokesperson Sean Spicer again reiterated Trump’s stance on protecting names of those who come and go from the White House, while mocking the past administration.
“I think that we recognize that there’s a privacy aspect to allowing citizens to come express their views. And that’s why we maintain the same policy that every other administration did coming up here prior to the last one,” Spicer told reporters. “And the last one, frankly, was a faux level of doing that, because when you go through and you scrub everyone’s name out that you don’t want everyone to know, that really is not an honest attempt at doing it. We are going to follow the law the way that every administration has followed up until the last one.”
In 2015, Trump again drew attention to the White House visitors’ lists.
“@chirofrenzy: Am flabbergasted your name was brought up in visiting White House in the same sentence as Al Sharpton like Gold & poop” Trump tweeted.
The Trump administration’s decision to keep the records secret means no documentation of any White House comings and goings will be routinely released while Trump is in office, though officials said information could be released case by case.
-with a file from The Associated Press
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