It’s good that Politico is closely tracking the White House visitor logs. The real question is why no one thought of this before.
The Trump administration announced in April that it would not release visitor records to the public, marking a major shift from the policy of former President Barack Obama. The decision was based on “the grave national security risks and privacy concerns of the hundreds of thousands of visitors annually,” said White House Communications Director Michael Dubke.
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The Trump administration also argued that visitor logs are “presidential records,” and therefore are not subject to Freedom of Information Act rules.
In response to this loss of government transparency, Politico has taken it upon itself to track visitors logs itself, no longer relying on the federal government’s now defunct Visitor Access Records webpage.
“Trump’s White House doesn’t want to release any visitor logs. So we decided to keep tabs ourselves,” the Virginia-based newsgroup bragged on social media.
Trump’s White House doesn’t want to release any visitor logs. So we decided to keep tabs ourselves. https://t.co/Kcbc0ofPPc pic.twitter.com/yK9mdc8TZF
— POLITICO (@politico) May 9, 2017
Politico is so proud of its work, in fact, that it pinned the above tweet to the top of its Twitter timeline.
“POLITICO’s UNAUTHORIZED White House Visitor Logs stand in for the official record, which the administration has decided not to release publicly,” the group explained this week.
They added, “To build a better, completely public visitor log, we compiled not just visits to the White House, but interactions that include in-person meetings with the president at Mar-a-Lago and other venues, appearances at events and documented phone calls with foreign leaders and other politicians.”
Good for them, and hooray for the return of shoe leather reporting. But it probably should not have taken the election of Donald Trump for reporters to keep careful tabs on the White House visitor logs. We should not have taken the government’s word for it in all those years past.
Though it’s commendable the Obama administration made an effort to make the records publicly available, the online portal that used to track visitor logs was notoriously sketchy. It was difficult to get exact figures on numbers of visits, time of day, etc. What used to exist wasn’t an unimpeachable source of information.
If nothing else, here’s hoping the 45th president of the United States serves as a lesson to those in the news industry that they should never become complacent, even if they like the man in the Oval Office. Here’s hoping Trump’s four (or eight?) years in office isn’t followed by another years-long media hibernation.
