President Donald Trump's White House won't be publishing visitor logs, officials announced on Friday afternoon.

The decision makes use of an anti-transparency ruling sought by the Obama administration and written in 2013 by Merrick Garland, a federal appeals court judge later nominated unsuccessfully to the Supreme Court by President Barack Obama.

Transparency advocates say Garland bent over backwards to overturn a lower-court ruling on visitor log access and expressed concern at the time about how the finding would be used by future administrations.

The Obama administration in 2009 began releasing some visitor logs as a matter of policy to resolve lawsuits from the liberal group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. The conservative group Judicial Watch sued for the complete logs, leading to Garland's 2013 ruling for a three-judge appeals panel.

Garland wrote that the president’s constitutional right to confidential communications means the Freedom of Information Act doesn't apply to visitor logs kept by the Secret Service, even though a standard four-factor analysis of whether the logs are “agency records” subject to FOIA was favorable to Judicial Watch.

Transparency advocates say exemptions permitted under FOIA would allow the White House to redact truly sensitive information.

White House communications director Michael Dubke, however, said Trump's decision not to release logs was made due to “the grave national security risks and privacy concerns of the hundreds of thousands of visitors annually.”

A White House official told Time that the Obama administration's scrubbing of log entries deemed sensitive or personal “did create more of a façade of transparency rather than complete transparency" anyhow.

Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton says the Trump decision still is disappointing.

"He could have gotten the results he wanted in terms of protecting his decision-making and the privacy of guests by following FOIA," he says. "This is an unfortunate establishment move from the White House."

It's unclear how significantly Garland's decision will hamstring forthcoming legal efforts to pry loose Trump visitor logs.

CREW and allied groups filed a federal lawsuit Monday in New York seeking access to the visitor logs. A leader of CREW did not immediately respond to an inquiry about whether the choice of venue was in response to Garland's ruling making success unlikely in the nation's capital.

Before Garland's ruling, legal fights over visitor logs yielded many wins for transparency advocates.

CREW’s struggle for visitor logs featured a 2007 federal court win for disclosure of records documenting conservative Christian leaders’ visits during the George W. Bush administration.

Judicial Watch, meanwhile, won voluntary disclosure in 2006 of visitor logs of former GOP influence-peddler Jack Abramoff after filing a lawsuit. (After leaving prison, Abramoff rebranded himself an anti-corruption advocate and told U.S. News in 2013 he found Garland’s ruling “a significant blow to transparency” that he hoped would be overturned.)

Fitton says he's not sure if his group will launch a new visitor log lawsuit.