White House opens logs

last updated 8 January 2015

The Obama administration announced that it will publish logs of visitors to the White House, though certain “sensitive” visits, such as meetings with potential Supreme Court nominees, would remain secret. The move came in response to a lawsuit by the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

Access to the visitor logs has been a sensitive subject since the Bush administration rebuffed attempts to learn the identities of visitors to the White House. The Bush administration argued that the logs were not subject to open-records laws, a position backed by the Obama administration but twice struck down by federal courts.