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

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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.”

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

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And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

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