Letter to President Donald Trump - Release White House Visitor Logs

Letter

It is now over one month into your Administration and you have yet to announce whether you will continue a policy of transparency with respect to individuals who visit the White House complex. The Obama Administration made White House visitor logs available on a regular basis. These logs provided the American public an unprecedented look at who was lobbying his Administration without compromising the President's ability to execute the functions of his office on a day-to-day basis. Under this policy, the logs were released 90 to 120 days after they were created. If you continue this policy, we should expect to see visitor logs from your White House as soon as April 20, 2017.

If you decide to stop or weaken this policy, it will be seen as yet another instance of you retreating from your campaign commitments to "drain the swamp." Some of us have already written to you raising concerns about transparency at your "Winter White House" at Mar-a-Lago. In a letter dated February 3, 2017, Senators Sheldon Whitehouse and Tom Udall asked you to make the Mar-a-Lago membership and visitor lists public, and take steps to ensure no person would be have illegal or unsecured access to you when you are working there. Your Administration never responded to that letter, despite you having already made four trips to Mar-a-Lago since your inauguration. Subsequent events during these visits do not inspire confidence that you take transparency or security during these visits seriously.

Another group of Senators has asked your White House Counsel for more information about the role Wall Street billionaire Carl Icahn is playing as your "special advisor" for cutting regulations. In a letter dated February 13, 2017, those Senators asked whether Mr. Icahn had provided any financial disclosures to your Administration, whether he would have special access to government information or policy-makers, and whether any he would be prohibited from providing advice in areas where he has obvious financial conflicts of interest. One way to provide assurances that your Administration is listening to the voices of all Americans, not just friends and donors who have a financial self-interest to influence government policy, is to let everyone know who is meeting with you and your staff. Your counsel never responded to that letter.

Regrettably, the cloak of secrecy seems to be falling over more and more parts of your Administration. Efforts to confirm several of your more controversial cabinet nominees, and your nominee to the Supreme Court, have been spearheaded by so-called "dark money" groups that have raised millions of dollars from undisclosed sources to spend on getting these nominees confirmed. As a result, the American people have no idea whether companies that stand to benefit from changes to federal policy are making a down-payment for those changes by secretly supporting your nominees. Continuing President Obama's transparency policies would help dispel concerns that the wealthy and the well-connected have unfair access to your White House.

Accordingly, we ask that you advise us of the following:

Have you decided to continue the policy of releasing White House visitor logs to the public? If so, are you making any changes to that policy and why?
Will you be extending the Workers and Visitors Entry System (WAVES) and Access Control Records (ACR), which form the basis form visitor disclosures, to other locations that you visit regularly and to which the public has access, like Mar-a-Lago?

We see no reason why you would be unable to continue policies of your predecessor. And we urge you to extend those policies to address your decision to regularly conduct official business at private properties that also provide access to certain members of the public. We request the courtesy of any answer to these questions no later than March 15, 2017.