Thousands of people from across the country — indeed from around the world — visit the White House every month. Many have agendas, not all of which are in the best interests of the nation, as with Service Employees International Union President Andy Stern, who has visited with President Obama and other senior White House officials at least 22 times since Inauguration Day.
Note well the qualifier “at least,” made necessary because the White House is not telling the truth on its official Web site about who visits the Oval Office. On the site where White House visitor logs are released, this statement appears: “As part of President Obama’s commitment to government transparency, we are providing records of White House visitors on an ongoing basis online. In December 2009, we will begin posting all White House visitor records for the period from September 15th onwards. …”
In reality, the Obama administration is not making public “all White House visitor records,” and is fighting in federal court against efforts by Judicial Watch to force it to actually do what it claims to be doing. It would be one thing if Obama administration officials argued against release on national security grounds or another of the permissible exceptions under the federal Freedom of Information Act that presumes all government documents public. Instead, the White House is advancing such a lame argument — the requested logs “are not agency records subject to FOIA” — that it has been rejected repeatedly by federal judges. In several recent court cases, federal judges found that the visitor logs meet the FOIA requirement since they were created by and are in the custody of the Secret Service. Even the Secret Service has acknowledged these facts in its responses to similar FOIA requests by Judicial Watch and news organizations like The Washington Post.
What makes this case even more clear, however, is this: If, as the Secret Service further argues, the visitor logs are presidential records under the “exclusive legal custody and control of the White House Office and the Office of the Vice President,” then President Obama and Vice President Biden can make all of the visitor logs public simply by directing that it be so. They haven’t, with a result that, as Judicial Watch notes, “tens of thousands of other [visitor log] records continue to be withheld in defiance of FOIA law. Why release some and not all? Only when all visitor logs are released can the American people be assured that the Obama White House is being forthright about who is visiting the White House.”
As these kinds of situations proliferate, public distrust of Obama will only grow.
