President-elect Donald Trump should voluntarily release White House visitor logs this time around in a departure from his first administration’s policy that alarmed watchdog groups, transparency advocates say.
The first Trump administration’s decision not to disclose who visited the president and attended meetings with federal officials departed from the policy of former President Barack Obama, whose White House released records roughly three months after visits occurred. Over the last four years, President Joe Biden reinstated the Obama-era rule for the logs on a monthly basis.
In the telling of watchdogs, releasing visitor logs is a basic level of transparency, providing the public with a window into who may be influencing their government and scoring access to the halls of power. Visitor logs are subject to the Presidential Records Act, meaning they are not required to be made public immediately, but they can be requested through the Freedom of Information Act five years after an administration ends. By that time, however, the records are likely of less public interest.
“Visitors logs should be made public,” CEO Peter Flaherty of the National Legal and Policy Center, an ethics watchdog group, told the Washington Examiner.
“The White House sits atop a vast executive bureaucracy,” said Flaherty, whose group has helped uncover scandals ranging from the Black Lives Matter charity’s financial mismanagement to the Biden administration’s apparent disregard of its own ethics rules. “The White House should set an example for transparency, even though it’s not required by law.”
It’s unclear if Trump intends to release visitor logs, and spokespeople for the Trump transition team did not respond to requests for comment. Still, failing to do so could conflict with Trump’s other plans for the second administration. He tapped billionaires Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk to lead a new Department of Government Efficiency to identify and cut unnecessary federal spending, with Musk vowing DOGE’s actions “will be posted online for maximum transparency.”
Under Biden, the disclosure of White House visitor logs illustrated how left-wing billionaires and influential policymakers at foundations earned a seat at the table, often meeting with the president and his team for intimate discussions. The Biden administration still faced significant scrutiny from watchdogs over transparency concerns, including in connection to taxpayer-backed handouts to climate groups and possible conflicts of interest involving federal officials.
Obama’s move to release visitor logs was not immediate. His administration initially faced lawsuits from conservative and left-wing watchdog groups eager to glean information on government happenings. The administration later came under fire for White House visitor log disclosures being “riddled with holes.” Since the early 2000s, transparency advocates have sought visitor logs, which the Clinton and Bush administrations declined to release.
Nick Penniman, the founder and CEO of Issue One, a group that investigates federal influence, said transparency “is a core ingredient of any advanced democracy.”
“We, the people, pay the salaries of those who work for our government, so we deserve to know who they’re meeting with,” Penniman told the Washington Examiner. So, as President Trump prepares to return to Washington, employees of the West Wing should be transparent with taxpayers about who’s potentially influencing policy decisions at the highest level.”
Over the course of the Biden administration, the Washington Examiner published various reports based on White House visitor logs that sought to pull back the curtain of federal influence. The Biden White House was revealed to have repeatedly hosted an official in Washington, D.C., who praised antisemite Louis Farrakhan — leading to Biden banning any such future meetings.
Alex Soros, the 39-year-old son of Democratic megadonor George Soros, was a frequent White House visitor. So were employees at foundations connected to the Rockefellers and other billionaire-backed groups pressuring the Biden administration to adopt left-leaning policies. Reported members of a covert Iranian government-controlled influence network also often took trips to the White House for meetings with senior U.S. officials, visitor logs show.
In July, as pressure built for Biden to drop out of the 2024 race over health concerns, the Washington Examiner reported that a Parkinson’s disease expert who met with Biden’s physician doubled as a donor to Biden’s campaign. The report prompted Jason Miller, a senior adviser to Trump, to declare on X, “It’s all a cover up!!!”
To Craig Holman, a progressive ethics expert at the Public Citizen think tank, White House visitor log disclosures are critical to understanding “influence peddling in the executive branch.”
“White House visitor log disclosures let the press and public know who is talking to the administration staff and when — whether or not they are registered lobbyists,” Holman told the Washington Examiner. “The visitor logs let us know the CEOs of which companies or other special interests are being entertained by White House staff or even the president. It allows the press and the public to connect the dots between White House policies and special interests that the Lobbying Disclosure Act alone cannot provide.”
Lobbying records filed with Congress are also critical for understanding special interests, but the documents are often barebones, leaving much to be desired as far as providing information, Holman added. Democratic lobbying firms with close ties to the White House cashed in under Biden and notably more than doubled their revenues since Biden assumed office, the Washington Free Beacon reported.
For Biden and Trump, questions surrounding the scope of what exactly visitor logs should encompass have been top of mind for watchdog groups.
Progressives sought filings for visitors to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, but a court panel ruled in 2020 that disclosure was exempt from the Freedom of Information Act over privacy concerns.
Last January, the White House said it did not track visitor logs for Biden’s personal residence in Wilmington, Delaware, where classified documents were located and at the center of a federal investigation.
The Secret Service said the agency also does not maintain visitor logs for the private homes of protectees.
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Michael Chamberlain, director of the watchdog group Protect the Public’s Trust, said it’s a clear transparency lapse that the Biden administration did not release visitor logs for Biden’s Delaware residence.
“President Biden has spent a significant amount of time during his presidency in Delaware, but his administration has not only resisted providing those visitor logs but claimed they did not even keep them,” said Chamberlain, a former Trump administration official.