The Obama White House’s transparency surrounding visitor logs wasn’t perfect, but by most measures, it was a breakthrough approach. From 2010 through 2016, the Democratic administration voluntarily disclosed the names of millions of visitors, publishing the information online for anyone to see.
This policy did not last. Soon after Donald Trump’s inauguration, the Republican White House scrapped the Obama-era policy. (The then-president’s team announced the change late in the day on Good Friday, ahead of a holiday weekend, in the hopes that fewer people would notice.) Visitor logs from Trump’s term were about as accessible as the Republican’s hidden tax returns.
This was obviously an important step backwards for government transparency — especially for a president who spent his term pretending to be an enthusiastic proponent of “total transparency” — but that wasn’t the only problem. After the Jan. 6 attack, congressional investigators wanted to know who had access to the White House, possibly having some influence with Trump and his team.
The more the former president kept visitor logs secret, the more it interfered with the review. It was against this backdrop that President Joe Biden’s team decided to direct the National Archives to send White House visitor logs from the Trump administration to the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack. NBC News reported this morning:
Former President Donald Trump was trying to block the release of the records, but White House counsel Dana Remus said in a letter to National Archivist David Ferriero on Tuesday that the president rejects Trump’s claim that the visitor logs from his time in office are subject to executive privilege.
For those who may need a refresher about how we arrived at this point, it was in October when the bipartisan House committee requested extensive materials from the White House, prompting Trump to demand absolute secrecy.
In fact, the former president and his team have tried to exert “executive privilege” to block the select committee’s requests. As NBC News has explained, as a matter of tradition, sitting presidents have shielded White House materials at the request of their predecessors. But not this time: Biden and Remus concluded that there were “unique and extraordinary circumstances” surrounding the insurrectionist attack on the Capitol, so they rejected the “executive privilege” claim.
Trump, who insisted he has “nothing to hide,” nevertheless sued both the committee and the National Archives, demanding that the records be kept hidden from congressional investigators.
The Republican’s case lost at every judicial level and the committee started receiving materials from the Archives last month.
But as regular readers know, that was only the first round of document production. The second round — which Trump also tried to keep under wraps — specifically included “communications concerning the former Vice President’s responsibilities as President of the Senate in certifying the vote of presidential electors on January 6, 2021.”
Now, Team Biden has rejected Trump’s executive privilege claims again. In the case of the visitor logs, the White House counsel’s office said the Archives should hand over the documents within 15 days “in light of the urgency” of the committee’s investigation. “The president has determined that an assertion of executive privilege is not in the best interests of the United States, and therefore is not justified, as to these records and portions of records,” Remus wrote in the letter, which was obtained Wednesday by NBC News. “The records in question are entries in visitor logs showing appointment information for individuals who were processed to enter the White House complex, including on January 6, 2021.” It’s possible, of course, that the former president and his lawyers will go back to court, hoping to stop, or at least delay, the document production. In theory, this would be ridiculous: The matter has already been adjudicated, and Team Trump lost completely. But as we’ve discussed, they may go through the motions anyway, knowing that failure is inevitable, if for no other reason than to give the Jan. 6 committee less time with the documents the former president would prefer to hide.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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