WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — The White House announced on Friday that it will cut off public access to visitor logs revealing who is entering the White House complex and shut down a disclosure website containing a wide range of government data. The decision breaks with past practice and returns a cloak of secrecy over the basic day-to-day workings of the administration.
The decision reverses a move by the Obama administration, which released more than six million White House visitor records, even as it fought successfully in federal court to keep some of the information secret. It followed months of speculation over how President Trump, who has rejected basic standards of presidential transparency — including the release of his tax returns — would handle the matter of revealing who comes and goes at the White House.
White House officials, conceding privately that the decision would be controversial, said the visitor logs were being withheld for national security reasons. They said they were relying on the same legal rationale espoused by the Obama administration in arguing that many of the records were essentially “presidential records,” and therefore not subject to public disclosure.
