Trump Declines to Release List of His Visitors at Mar-a-Lago

[GMDino]

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/15/us/politics/trump-declines-to-release-list-of-his-visitors-at-mar-a-lago.html?smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur

Quote:WASHINGTON — The Trump administration on Friday escalated a battle with government ethics groups by declining, even in the face of a federal court order, 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 to make the visitors log public, 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 them 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 Aprilto 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.


Federal law exempts the White House from the Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, which requires public disclosure of government documents. But CREW and its partners argued that because the presidential visitor records are typically maintained by the Secret Service — which is part of the Department of Homeland Security — they should not be exempt from public release.

In July Judge Katherine Polk Failla of Federal District Court in Manhattan ordered the Trump administration to release the “records of presidential visitors at Mar-a-Lago” by September.

But the Department of Justice, in a statement it sent to CREW, said it had decided not to release the names of everyone visiting with the president at Mar-a-Lago.

“The remaining records that the Secret Service has processed in response to the Mar-a-Lago request contain, reflect, or otherwise relate to the president’s schedules,” Chad A. Readler, acting assistant attorney general, wrote in response to CREW in a letter dated Tuesday, but delivered on Friday. “The government believes that presidential schedule information is not subject to FOIA.”


Noah Bookbinder, CREW’s executive director, said that the organization would challenge the Justice Department’s decision. The Obama administration had faced a similar lawsuit before it decided in late 2009 to start to make visitor logs public, a practice that stopped with Mr. Trump’s arrival.

“After waiting months for a response to our request for comprehensive visitor logs from the president’s multiple visits to Mar-a-Lago and having the government ask for a last minute extension, today we received 22 names from the Japanese prime minister’s visit to Mar-a-Lago and nothing else,” Mr. Bookbinder said in a statement. “The government does not believe that they need to release any further Mar-a-Lago visitor records. We vehemently disagree. The government seriously misrepresented their intentions to both us and the court. This was spitting in the eye of transparency. We will be fighting this in court.”

Tom Blanton, director of the nonprofit National Security Archive, said his group was told by a Justice Department lawyer that the Secret Service did not keep a formal log of visitors to Mar-a-Lago similar to what is maintained for the White House. Instead, Mr. Blanton said he expected on Friday to get copies of hundreds of Secret Service emails that listed the names of presidential visitors to Mar-a-Lago, which, once assembled, would represent as comprehensive a list as possible.

Mr. Trump visited Mar-a-Lago for 25 days between his inauguration and the middle of May, when the club closes for the summer. As with many of the clubs in Palm Beach, it is typically open during the resort area’s high season, which runs from Thanksgiving to after Mother’s Day.

He often brought an entourage of top White House officials with him, even using Mar-a-Lago as a place to meet with world leaders, like President Xi Jinping of China.

Mar-a-Lago membership lists obtained by The New York Times have given a hint of frequent guests at the club. The nearly 500 paying members — it costs $200,000 to join the club, plus annual dues — include dozens of real estate developers, Wall Street financiers, energy executives and others whose businesses could be affected by Mr. Trump’s policies.

William I. Koch, who oversees a major mining and fuels company, belongs to Mar-a-Lago, according to these lists obtained in early 2017, as did the billionaire trader Thomas Peterffy, who spent more than $8 million on political ads in 2012 warning of creeping socialism in America.

Correction: September 15, 2017 

An earlier version of this article and an accompanying caption misstated how much time President Trump spent at Mar-a-Lago in the first months of his presidency. He visited for 25 days, not 25 times.

[JustWinBaby]

OMG.....earth shattering news

[GMDino]

(09-16-2017, 04:14 AM)JustWinBaby Wrote: OMG.....earth shattering news

That Trump doesn't follow a judge's ruling?  Or that Trump wants to hide what he is doing?

Neither of those is earth shattering.

[BmorePat87]

Transparency is a partisan issue.

[*bfine32*]

Am I the only one that finds it ironic that a liberal group is demanding to know what happens in private?

[GMDino]

(09-16-2017, 10:52 AM)bfine32 Wrote: Am I the only one that finds it ironic that a liberal group is demanding to know what happens in private?

Probably.  Since it's not "private".  It's the POTUS.

[BmorePat87]

(09-16-2017, 10:52 AM)bfine32 Wrote: Am I the only one that finds it ironic that a liberal group is demanding to know what happens in private?

I think they'd argue that who the President, and all public officials for that matter, meets with is "public" not "private". 

[*bfine32*]

Okey Doke, I see I have been straightened out. What the President does at a Private resort should be public. Seems I remember Obama fighting making the visitor logs public at the White House. I can only imagine the uproar from liberal groups.

I have no problem if every visitor POTUS has is public knowledge; it just seemed ironic that a liberal group was pushing for this. Of course this is not the first thing that I have found ironic that others have not. I find it also surprising the folks on here that agree with my stance.

[hollodero]

(09-16-2017, 02:56 PM)bfine32 Wrote: Okey Doke, I see I have been straightened out. What the President does at a Private resort should be public. Seems I remember Obama fighting making the visitor logs public at the White House. I can only imagine the uproar from liberal groups.

I have no problem if every visitor POTUS has is public knowledge; it just seemed ironic that a liberal group was pushing for this. Of course this is not the first thing that I have found ironic that others have not. I find it also surprising the folks on here that agree with my stance.

Are they a distinct liberal group? I only came across Richard Painter, who I figured was more of a conservative.

Be that as it may - one difference between Obama and Trump is that the latter is way more suspicious of having public life as POTUS and private life as businessman and dealmaker mixed up. That is hard to argue against, I suppose a Court saw it similarly. Neglecting a court order raises even more suspicion and certainly can't be the preferred way to go.

[GMDino]

(09-16-2017, 02:56 PM)bfine32 Wrote: Okey Doke, I see I have been straightened out. What the President does at a Private resort should be public. Seems I remember Obama fighting making the visitor logs public at the White House. I can only imagine the uproar from liberal groups.

I have no problem if every visitor POTUS has is public knowledge; it just seemed ironic that a liberal group was pushing for this. Of course this is not the first thing that I have found ironic that others have not. I find it also surprising the folks on here that agree with my stance.

Yep.  Obama fought it and then went ahead and released them anyway.

[BmorePat87]

(09-16-2017, 02:56 PM)bfine32 Wrote: Okey Doke, I see I have been straightened out. What the President does at a Private resort should be public. 

I would argue the President is always working and he claimed to be working every time he went there. Whether or not the residence is private doesn't change his role as a public official. Just my take.

Quote:Seems I remember Obama fighting making the visitor logs public at the White House. I can only imagine the uproar from liberal groups.

This same group sued Obama and rightfully so. The link in the first post references it.

Quote:I have no problem if every visitor POTUS has is public knowledge; it just seemed ironic that a liberal group was pushing for this. Of course this is not the first thing that I have found ironic that others have not. I find it also surprising the folks on here that agree with my stance.

This shouldn't be a partisan issue. Transparency should be something everyone agrees on.  Like two of us said, there's a difference between a private citizen and a public official, which is why there, in my opinion, isn't any irony in a liberal group seeking this from the past two Presidents. 

This does open up a good debate though: Is the President ever a "private citizen" when in office?

[BmorePat87]

(09-16-2017, 03:54 PM)hollodero Wrote: Are they a distinct liberal group? I only came across Richard Painter, who I figured was more of a conservative.

Be that as it may - one difference between Obama and Trump is that the latter is way more suspicious of having public life as POTUS and private life as businessman and dealmaker mixed up. That is hard to argue against, I suppose a Court saw it similarly. Neglecting a court order raises even more suspicion and certainly can't be the preferred way to go.

The article refers to them as a liberal group.

[*bfine32*]

(09-16-2017, 07:23 PM)BmorePat87 Wrote: I would argue the President is always working and he claimed to be working every time he went there. Whether or not the residence is private doesn't change his role as a public official. Just my take.



This same group sued Obama and rightfully so. The link in the first post references it.





This shouldn't be a partisan issue. Transparency should be something everyone agrees on.  Like two of us said, there's a difference between a private citizen and a public official, which is why there, in my opinion, isn't any irony in a liberal group seeking this from the past two Presidents. 

This does open up a good debate though: Is the President ever a "private citizen" when in office?

Yeah, the group sued Bush and Obama, but still unsure that means that it's not ironic that a liberal group would strive to strip privacy. Seems something that a conservative group would push for. 

Obama eventually opened White House logs; unless, of course if,  they were personal guests and that did not include guests at his vacation location.

I suppose there is a solid debate to be had in discussing that what level of privacy POTUS is afforded

[hollodero]

(09-16-2017, 07:24 PM)BmorePat87 Wrote: The article refers to them as a liberal group.

Yeah, I saw that, doesn't mean it is so. Richard Painter. 
But it isn't important, except when it's weaved into a defensive argument.

[*bfine32*]

(09-16-2017, 08:21 PM)hollodero Wrote: Yeah, I saw that, doesn't mean it is so. Richard Painter. 
But it isn't important, except when it's weaved into a defensive argument.

Quote:CREW[edit]

Main article: Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington
In 2014, David Brock became the chairman of the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington board of directors, in what was characterized as a more explicitly partisan stance for the organization.[42] Brock was elected as CREW's board president after laying out a broad plan to turn the organization into a more muscular and partisan organization. Politico described this as “a major power play that aligns liberal muscle more fully behind the Democratic Party — and Hillary Clinton” and said that Brock had set forth a plan "to turn the group into a more muscular — and likely partisan — attack dog."[43]

While CREW operates as a 501©3 nonprofit prohibited from engaging in partisan activity, Brock made clear he intends to create a more politically oriented arm registered under section 501©4, and also form a new overtly partisan watchdog group called The American Democracy Legal Fund registered under section 527, allowing it to engage in direct political activity. Along with Brock's election, consultant David Mercer and investor Wayne Jordan joined CREW's board of directors. When asked if CREW would still continue pursuing complaints against Democrats, Brock responded, "No party has a monopoly on corruption and at this early juncture, we are not making categorical statements about anything that we will and won't do. Having said that, our experience has been that the vast amount of violations of the public trust can be found on the conservative side of the aisle."[43]

[Belsnickel]

(09-16-2017, 08:21 PM)hollodero Wrote: Yeah, I saw that, doesn't mean it is so. Richard Painter. 
But it isn't important, except when it's weaved into a defensive argument.

Yeah, Painter is a part of it, and so are some other conservative lawyers. The fact is that this group has not really been active to this degree until Trump became the nominee, and since then has been in high gear. They have been around and doing things, but not to this level. Would this have been the case if Clinton was in office? Hard to say. I don't disagree that there are a lot of questionable things in the Trump administration, too. But it ti a left leaning organization based on what I have seen. I think it may be more appropriately couched as an establishment defense organization, though.

[BmorePat87]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/taxpayers-billed-1092-for-an-officials-two-night-stay-at-trumps-mar-a-lago-club/2017/09/15/e3e5dfdc-97c6-11e7-82e4-f1076f6d6152_story.html?utm_term=.758484642829

One of the first clues over how Trump is profiting off of Mar a Lago came this week via a FOIA request from the Coast Guard. The invoice shows an unknown official stayed at the resort at the cost of $1,092 for two nights. The only clue is that it is labeled "National Security Council".

Trump spent 25 of his first 120 days in Mar a Lago (the club operates between November and May). While the White House claims that any guests of the President, such as the Prime Minister of Japan, will without any cost to tax payers, the lack of transparency in these FOIA requests makes it unknown if this is even true. The tax payers could have paid Trump hundreds of thousands to millions in a 4 month span for all of the necessary support staff to stay with him as he vacationed in Florida 7 of his first 13 weekends as President.

[JustWinBaby]

(09-16-2017, 10:36 AM)BmorePat87 Wrote: Transparency is a partisan issue.

I believe Obama started this, which is a good practice (although I thought they could still remove/block names as they saw fit, which makes it kind of a fake transparency).

I'm surprised Trump wouldn't invite a bunch of Russians and then release the records, just to troll everyone.

[JustWinBaby]

(09-16-2017, 08:04 PM)bfine32 Wrote: I suppose there is a solid debate to be had in discussing that what level of privacy POTUS is afforded

I thought the actual argument, as I've read, is the privacy of the individuals visiting POTUS (rather than POTUS himself), and also national security issues (which the 3-month lag is supposed to mostly address).

Just another Obama policy Trump is shredding.....and I kind of enjoy the panty bunching every time it happens.

[BmorePat87]

(09-17-2017, 06:22 PM)JustWinBaby Wrote: I believe Obama started this, which is a good practice (although I thought they could still remove/block names as they saw fit, which makes it kind of a fake transparency).

I'm surprised Trump wouldn't invite a bunch of Russians and then release the records, just to troll everyone.

He certainly provided a false sense of transparency in his actions.