Trump administration will break with practice of Barack Obama of making public who visits White House, citing privacy and national security concerns

The White House won’t make public the logs of visitors to the White House complex, breaking with the practice of Donald Trump’s predecessor.

Senior White House officials cited privacy and national security concerns for the decision, which they say is in line with what previous administrations have done – except for Barack Obama’s. They say continuing to release the records could interfere with policy development, among other things.

After some litigation, the Obama White House began releasing the visitor records on a delayed basis. White House lawyers also deleted names for national security and other reasons before the logs were made public. The Obama administration eventual released nearly six million visitor records.

In 2012, Trump, then a private citizen, tweeted: “Why is @BarackObama spending millions to try and hide his records? He is the least transparent President--ever--and he ran on transparency.”

The Trump officials requested anonymity to describe the policy before it is announced.

The White House was repeatedly asked last month which staff member had cleared House intelligence committee chairman Devin Nunes into the grounds, at the height of the controversy over his announcement that he had seen information suggesting Trump or his advisers may have been swept up in surveillance of foreigners. This information would typically have been contained in the visitor logs.



Faiz Shakir of the American Civil Liberties Union said government business should be “conducted in transparent daylight” and “the only reasonable conclusion is to believe the Trump administration has many things it is trying to hide”.

“This ‘Good Friday’ news dump is simply the latest in a series of efforts by President Trump to avoid public accountability, and it’s not the way to improve the people’s declining trust in this administration,” he said.

“Trump has bullied the press when they report on him. He has promoted the reporting of fake and outright false information. He imposed gags on federal employees in the earliest days of his administration. He has avoided disclosing his tax records, and he has avoided releasing information about his conflicts of interest.

Noah Bookbinder of the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington said in a statement: “It’s disappointing that the man who promised to ‘drain the swamp’ just took a massive step away from transparency by refusing the release the White House visitor logs that the American people have grown accustomed to accessing over the last six years and that provide indispensable information about who is seeking to influence the president.”

He added: “The Obama administration agreed to release the visitor logs in response to our lawsuits, and despite the Trump administration’s worry over ‘grave national security risks and concerns,’ only positives for the American people came out of them. This week, we sued the Trump administration to make sure they would continue to release the logs. It looks like we’ll see them in court.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report