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Judi Lynn

(160,211 posts)
Tue May 19, 2020, 02:01 AM May 2020

2nd Circuit Helps White House Hide Visitor Logs

Published: May 18, 2020
Edited by Tom Blanton and Lauren Harper

Ruling in Doyle v. DHS never mentions Obama published 6 million visitor records

Archive, CREW, Knight Institute lawsuit exposes weak federal records laws

Washington, D.C., May 18, 2020 – The 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals today ruled against the National Security Archive’s lawsuit to restore the routine disclosure, under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), of the White House visitor logs that were taken down by the Trump administration in early 2017.

The 2nd Circuit’s 22-page ruling concentrates on the ostensible intrusion on a president’s ability to receive confidential advice, and the supposed burden of using FOIA’s regular exemptions to process the logs for release, while never acknowledging that the Obama White House routinely published its visitor logs some 90 days after the visit – some six million such records in all – with no apparent hindrance on presidential activity.

The ruling highlights severe weaknesses in the Federal Records Act – which apparently does not preclude a president from converting agency records into presidential ones not covered by FOIA through the simple expedient of a memo of understanding – and in the Presidential Records Act – which provides extremely limited forms of external review for White House record-keeping and the lack thereof.

Archive senior analyst Kate Doyle filed FOIA requests for White House visitor logs beginning with the Trump inauguration in January 2017, as part of her work tracking U.S.-Mexico relations from her office in New York. The requests went to the Secret Service, which checks incoming visitors against various criminal databases, as part of its statutory duties within the Department of Homeland Security to protect the president.

More:
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/news/foia/2020-05-18/second-circuit-helps-white-house-hide-visitor-logs?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=bc6f4fec-2ab2-48ad-9563-a521cb9e66b7

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