Like the Bush administration, the Obama administration has taken the unpopular stance that it does not have to release its visitor logs to the public.  This is an incredibly disappointing move that casts doubts on Obama’s rhetoric of increased executive branch transparency & accountability.  Hiding these logs prevents the public from better knowing who is lobbying the president.

Two federal court rulings have established that such records are public information, however, the Secret Service denied a request for them made by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) as well as a request from MSNBC.com.  Today, CREW is suing the Department of Homeland Security which oversees the Secret Service.

The Obama administration argues that these records are not the property of the Secret Service and thus are not subject to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).  Rather, they take the same stance the Bush administration did by asserting that the visitor logs are presidential records.  U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth twice ruled against them that the records are subject to FOIA since they are created and maintained by the Secret Service.

CREW had been attempting to learn about visits made by coal executives in order to assess the  coal industry’s influence on the administration’s energy policy.