July 17, 2017

The Trump Administration Will Finally Release Its Mar-a-Lago Visitor Logs

Thanks to a suit from CREW, which hopes records from Trump Tower and the White House are next.

Meghan Mccarthy/ZUMA

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

The Department of Homeland Security will release the visitor logs from President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, thanks to an ongoing lawsuit filed by the government watchdog organization, Citizens for Responsible Ethics in Washington—a group that has been fiercely critical of the Trump administration’s lack of transparency and its potential conflicts of interest.

“The public deserves to know who is coming to meet with the president and his staff,” CREW executive director Noah Bookbinder said in a statement Monday. “We are glad that as a result of this case, this information will become public for meetings at his his personal residences—but it needs to be public for meetings at the White House as well.”

The group said that it will receive the records by September 8—though there has been some ambiguity over what logs exist in the first place—and then make them available for public review. A federal judge ruled the administration must release certain visitor logs on Friday.

In April, CREW, along with the National Security Archive and Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, sued the Trump administration for access to visitor records at the White House, Trump Tower, and Mar-a-Lago, amid increasing concerns over the White House’s silence on whether it would make such documents public. Barring a few exceptions, the Obama administration started voluntarily releasing visitor logs in September 2009.

Since becoming president, Trump has visited the Palm Beach resort more than 20 times, using the grounds to conduct high-level meetings with world leaders such as Chinese President Xi Jinping and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Experts have warned that the estate is extremely vulnerable to hackers and other cyber security threats.

In a 2012 tweet, Trump criticized Obama for being the “least transparent President ever.”

WE'LL BE BLUNT:

We need to start raising significantly more in donations from our online community of readers, especially from those who read Mother Jones regularly but have never decided to pitch in because you figured others always will. We also need long-time and new donors, everyone, to keep showing up for us.

In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

Please learn more about how Mother Jones works and our 47-year history of doing nonprofit journalism that you don't find elsewhere—and help us do it with a donation if you can. We've already cut expenses and hitting our online goal is critical right now.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

We need to start raising significantly more in donations from our online community of readers, especially from those who read Mother Jones regularly but have never decided to pitch in because you figured others always will. We also need long-time and new donors, everyone, to keep showing up for us.

In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

Please learn more about how Mother Jones works and our 47-year history of doing nonprofit journalism that you don't elsewhere—and help us do it with a donation if you can. We've already cut expenses and hitting our online goal is critical right now.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate