Let There Be Light
Published on January 10, 2009
Federal District Court Rules Against Bush Administration in FOIA Case Seeking White House Visitor Logs.
In an important Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) case pitting a citizen watchdog group against the Bush Administration’s expansive assertions of government secrecy, a federal district court judge has ruled for the citizen group.
A measure of the significance of the case is that it has nothing to do with arguments involving national security, trade secrets, or the attorney-client privilege. Instead, it has to do with access to information that, prior to the Bush Administration’s broad policy to block and delay access to government records, would have been considered routine data clearly covered by FOIA.
Specifically, the case is about the efforts of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) to get access to visitor logs recording visits by the late-Jerry Falwell, James Dobson, Gary Bauer, and six other conservative religious leaders to the White House and the Vice President’s office. CREW is also seeking records of visits by Stephen Payne a Houston-based lobbyist who was captured on videotape last July appearing to offer access to Bush Administration officials in exchange for six figure donations to the Bush Presidential Library. A pivotal issue before the court, wrote Judge Royce Lamberth in his January 9th ruling, “is whether the presidential communications privilege extends far enough to cover the identities of visitors to the White House and the Vice President’s residence. If it does then all of the records sought by plaintiff [CREW] are exempt from FOIA, and DHS [the Department of Homeland Security] has no disclosure obligations related to plaintiff’s FOIA request. If it does not, then DHS remains obligated under FOIA to produce the requested records.”
Judge Lamberth had previously ruled that the sought records were “agency records” and thus subject to timely disclosure under FOIA. Had the records been deemed presidential papers, there release would have been delayed by five to twelve years, and then only if their release was not contested by President Bush or Vice President Cheney.
“The presidential communications privilege,” he wrote, “..extends only to communications. The visit records sought by plaintiff need only consist of the visitor’s name, date and time of visit, and in some cases the name of the person requesting access for the visitor and in some cases the name of the person visited. Such information sheds no light on the content of communications between the visitor and the President or his advisors, whether the communications related to presidential deliberation or decision making, or whether any substantive communications even occurred.”
In the January 9th ruling, Judge Lamberth also agreed with CREW that the Secret Service had wrongly destroyed federal records at the direction of the White House and that the federal Archivist violated a legal obligation to notify the Attorney General to initiate legal action to recover deleted records. He thus ordered the Archivist to make the notification.
“CREW’s victory today reaffirms the public’s right to know what the government is doing,” said Anne Weismann, the group’s chief counsel. “We are pleased that the judicial branch has ripped the cloak of secrecy away from the White House and we hope the incoming Administration takes heed of the court’s decision and ensures Secret Service records are available to the public.”