A lawsuit filed Thursday says the Trump administration must turn over visitor logs pertaining to four offices within the White House complex.
In its case, the progressive advocacy group Public Citizen takes a narrower approach than groups behind expansive Freedom of Information Act litigation in New York.
The Trump administration ended the voluntary disclosure of partial visitor logs in April, describing generously redacted Obama lists as creating a facade of transparency.
The Obama White House agreed in 2009 to release some logs to end lawsuits that began under George W. Bush, after two district court defeats. But the Obama administration also sought and received a 2013 appeals court ruling that FOIA doesn’t cover presidential visitors.
The new lawsuit filed in D.C. seeks to make use that 2013 ruling from the D.C. Circuit, which despite being reviled by transparency activists says some White House offices are covered by FOIA.
The appeals ruling said the president’s constitutional right to confidential communications means FOIA doesn’t apply to visitor logs kept by the Secret Service, but that some offices on the White House grounds “are not part of the President’s immediate staff and whose ‘sole function’ is not to ‘advise and assist the President.'”
“Those offices are ‘agencies’ under FOIA, and their records are ‘agency records’ subject to disclosure,” the appeals ruling said, specifically mentioning the Office of Management and Budget, the Council on Environmental Quality, the Office of National Drug Control Policy, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative and the Office of Science Technology Policy.
Public Citizen seeks records from the OMB, CEQ, ONDCP and the OSTP.
“We requested only the records that the D.C. Circuit said were agency records subject to FOIA,” said Public Citizen attorney Adina Rosenbaum. “We didn’t request visitors to the president’s office, we requested visitors just to these four agencies.”
The Secret Service declined to comment on the lawsuit. White House spokespeople did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In denying a Public Citizen’s request, however, the Secret Service laid out three justifications, according to the lawsuit — including that the Secret Service “has no ability to discern” from a visitor log maintenance system if guests are meeting with an entity covered by FOIA.
The Secret Service also said, according to the lawsuit, that the records are covered by the Presidential Records Act rather than FOIA and that the Secret Service doesn’t have the records because they were turned over to the White House Office of Records Management.
“Unfortunately after the gamesmanship of the Obama administration and the Bush administration, it’s no surprise the new administration is seeking to wall off even more visitor logs,” said Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, the conservative transparency group that lost the 2013 court ruling.
“Essentially, these are Secret Service records, not White House records, that’s the crux of it,” Fitton said. “The Trump administration is unfortunately following the transparency policy of the Obama administration.”
The more expansive ongoing visitor logs litigation — filed in April by CREW, the National Security Archive and the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University — seeks to have all White House visitor logs declared subject to FOIA, along with Secret Service records of people visiting Trump at his residences in Mar-a-Lago, Fla., and Trump Tower in New York.
Rosenbaum said although Public Citizen’s case is more narrow, the records are important.
“Records of visitors to government agencies show who they are meeting with and what voices those agencies are hearing,” she said. “It helps show us who is impacting government decisions.”
