The Trump administration said Friday it will not release logs of White House visitors, breaking with a precedent set by the Obama administration and shrouding Trump's activities in the West Wing in secrecy.
The Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington said it has sued the Trump administration for the release of the White House's visitor logs. Bookbinder said in a statement the logs "provide indispensable information about who is seeking to influence the president".
The decision, after almost three months of speculation about the fate of the records, marks a dramatic shift from the Obama Administration's voluntary disclosure of more than 6 million records during his presidency.
President Donald Trump has made a decision to discontinue a policy of making visitors to the White House public.
Paul S. Ryan, a vice president at Common Cause, said such meetings would be harder to track with Trump's new policy.
Trump himself tweeted criticism in 2012 of the Obama administration's court fights to keep its records firmly under White House control.
Under Obama, such records, which were published on a White House-maintained website, were typically disclosed 90 to 120 days after the visit.
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Visits to the White House became a matter of particular interest after Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) met with sources on White House grounds who supposedly told him the Trump campaign had been caught up in government surveillance of Trump Tower.
In reality, the White House visitor logs rarely informed the public of anything. The White House says the records are exempt from the law.
A limited number of records for visitors to White House departments, such as the Office of Management and Budget, will remain accessible through Freedom of Information Act requests, but most records will remain unavailable, including those dealing with the president and his senior staff. But in every other way, he was one of the least transparent presidents in the post-Watergate era. Dubke cited Trump's recent executive order placing restrictions on lobbyists and his inclusion of new news outlets in the daily press briefing.
The liberal-leaning American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said in its own statement: "Elected officials work for the people and we deserve to see government business conducted in transparent daylight".
The Obama Administration, for instance, took a wide-ranging view of what were considered personal events hosted by the Obamas, leaving off celebrity sightings and meetings with top donors.
Trump officials said the Obama Administration went to federal court and the United States Court of Appeals to preserve the power to redact and withhold records.
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