A conservative legal group has filed suit against the Secret Service, challenging the Obama administration’s policy on releasing White House visitor logs.
The move comes just months after the administration settled several similar cases by agreeing to post portions of the records online.
In a complaint filed Dec. 7 at the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, lawyers for Washington-based Judicial Watch said the group had filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking the logs in August. The Secret Service rejected the request, contending that the logs are not subject to the statute.
Judicial Watch argues that position “has been litigated and rejected repeatedly,” and is seeking a court ruling declaring that the logs are indeed subject to FOIA.
In September, the left-leaning Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington announced it had settled four cases in which it had sued the White House over the visitor logs. In the settlement, the White House committed to begin voluntarily posting its visitor records online, with some exceptions for national security concerns. It announced that it would release the first batch of visitor records, dating back to Sept. 15, 2009, at the end of this month.
In an interview, Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said the White House still had too much leeway to hold back information.
“While it is good that there is voluntary disclosure of some of these records, there’s no legal recourse if they withhold some records improperly, no legal recourse to find if they’re holding some records secretly,” Fitton said. “This discretionary release is, in the end, lawless, and we just want a regular way of getting access to these records.”
The White House did not immediately return a call for comment.
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