The liberal media are livid following the announcement on Friday that the Trump White House will no longer — in the words of CNN — “release logs of White House visitors.” In so doing, the least reliable name in cable news goes on, the current administration is “breaking with a precedent set by the Obama administration.”
Other outlets chimed in, among them The Washington Post, which grumbled:
The Trump administration announced Friday that it will not follow former president Barack Obama’s policy of voluntarily disclosing the names of most visitors to the White House complex, citing “grave national security risks and privacy concerns.”
You can find more of the same in The New York Times, Mother Jones, NPR, and even on Twitter. Here’s Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer:
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
Another glaring ex of Pres Trump saying one thing & doing another. Why aren't White House visitor logs being made public? What's he hiding?
— Chuck Schumer (@SenSchumer) April 15, 2017
I believe Schumer has his presidents confused. It was not Donald Trump who promised to oversee the transparent administration in the history of the planet. It was his predecessor. And even then, Barack Obama was not true to his word.
Consider a newspaper article from early in his presidency, which begins:
President Obama has embraced Bush administration justifications for denying public access to White House visitor logs even as advisers say they are reviewing the policy of keeping secret the official record of comings and goings.
The Washington Post, mentioned earlier, should pay particular attention to this article. It ran in their pages on June 17, 2009.
It is worth noting, moreover, that Obama not only refused to make his visitors logs private but fought hard to keep these documents away from prying eyes. In 2013, his administration sued to keep the names of his visitors secret and won a favorable ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. According to Judicial Watch, which attempted to gain access to the records via a FOIA request, the court “found that U.S. Secret Service’s White House visitor logs for people visiting the president’s office are not subject to disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act.”
