WEST SACRAMENTO CA (IFS) -- This post was made on or about March 25, 2017. Mary Beth Broderson-Soper nailed it right from the start. This small item did not seem like much at the time, but now -- it's a time bomb and the President is pushing back hard.
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration on Friday escalated a battle with government ethics groups by declining to release the identities of individuals visiting with President Trump at his family’s Mar-a-Lago resort during the days he has spent at the private club in Palm Beach, Fla., this year.
The surprising move by the Department of Justice, which had been ordered in July by a federal court to complete its review of Mar-a-Lago visitor records, came after weeks of promotion by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the liberal nonprofit group known as CREW, that it would soon be getting the Mar-a-Lago visitors logs.
Instead, on Friday the Justice Department released a State Department list of just 22 names — all of the members of the delegation of the Japanese prime minister — who visited the club in February for a meeting with President Trump.
The dispute centers on what kind of records related to private individuals visiting the president should be open to public inspection. The refusal to disclose the full list of presidential visitors’ names also brings renewed scrutiny to the president’s private business empire and raises questions about why the administration would want to withhold information that could reveal possible conflicts of interest.
CREW and its partners in the effort — the National Security Archive and the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University — sued in April to get access to presidential visitor logs for Mar-a-Lago, the White House and Trump Tower in New York. CREW requested only a list of people explicitly visiting the president, not, for example, all Mar-a-Lago members or other guests who happened to be there on those days.
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