The private guest list

20 Jan 2007 // ONE of the more lamentable trademarks of the Bush Administration has been its obsession with secrecy. It has gone far beyond executive branch confidentiality to practical cover-up.

The latest example of going to surreptitious extremes at the public's expense is a recently revealed memorandum between the White House and the Secret Service. The timing of the document speaks volumes about the administration's usual circle-the-wagons response to any questionable activity or policy.

Just as the explosive Beltway scandal involving Jack Abramoff, convicted former super-lobbyist, was heating up and top powerbrokers in Washington were being implicated, the White House moved quickly to cordon itself off from scrutiny.

The pact, quietly signed last spring with the Secret Service, withholds records of visitors to the White House from the public. That's a break from past practices where the agency's logs of various White House visitors have shed light on past scandals and investigations.

But as increasing attention was being paid to the Abramoff-White House link and only a day after a federal court was asked to intervene in efforts to obtain the White House visitor logs, the memo changed everything. It suddenly declared that all information regarding White House visitors would henceforth belong to closed presidential records rather than open-to-the-public agency records.

The White House has already used the memorandum as leverage in a separate case to argue against releasing Secret Service logs of visitors to see the vice president. But there's been no judicial clarification on who legally controls the visitor logs.

So some critics conclude the agreement between administration and agency at a minimum will serve to postpone a final resolution of who these records belong to. Steven Aftergood of the Project on Government Secrecy for the Federation of American Scientists also believes the memo reflects the Bush Administration's view of American government, "which is that the people's business should be conducted behind closed doors."

Anne Weismann, a veteran Justice Department lawyer and now chief counsel to Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, takes a more jaundiced position. "It appears the White House is actually manufacturing evidence to further its own agenda," she said.

Maybe the Bush Administration is simply indulging in its trademark secretiveness to protect itself and plead ignorant of any chronic abuse of power.