Editorial: Obama vague on visitors list

Policy at odds with pledge

17 Aug 2009 // During the campaign, candidate Barack Obama made unambiguous commitments to openness and transparency. But once in office, he has been far more tentative about public disclosure, at times opting to continue Bush administration policies of withholding information.

President Obama started off well enough, revoking a Bush executive order restricting public access to records in the presidential libraries and reversing another Bush administration order by ordering federal agencies in dealing with requests for information to err on the side of disclosure.

He also ordered a review intended to cut down on the government’s proclivity for overclassifying information as secret.

Since then, however, he has passed up opportunities to make public information that the Bush administration kept secret. The most charitable explanation is that the White House wants to be careful how it proceeds, not wanting to precipitously put in place a disclosure policy it would then find embarrassing to have to withdraw.

Recently, the White House again got caught in this quandary by blocking the public from viewing White House visitor logs. The issue was raised when the watchdog group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, sought a list of healthcare executives who visited the White House.

At first, the White House denied the request, but then relented and released the names and dates of the visits shortly after the group filed a federal lawsuit.

Although President Obama’s Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said the policy of withholding the logs is under review, the Obama White House continues, except for a few isolated cases, to hold the same position as the Bush White House: The president is entitled to keep secret the identity of his visitors in order to receive candid, confidential advice.

However, typically in Washington, this policy was imposed for a more pedestrian reason — to avoid political embarrassment.

When the influence-peddling scandal of lobbyist Jack Abramoff broke, news organizations and watchdog groups sought to find how often the now-imprisoned Mr. Abramoff visited the Bush White House and whom he saw. Normally, this should have been a public record.

The White House then engaged in a bureaucratic shell game with the records. Instead of being agency records, the Secret Service’s, and, thus, subject to Freedom of Information requests, they were declared presidential records and, thus, protected from disclosure by executive privilege.

The Obama White House may want to think carefully how it handles this since a federal judge has twice rejected this argument when it was put forward by the Bush administration.