Mar-a-Lago Visitor Logs To Be Released By DHS, Watchdog Groups Optimistic

FILE - In this Jan. 22, 2005 file photo, the entrance of Mar-a-Lago in West Palm Beach, Fla. Donald Trump received a $17 million insurance payment in 2005 for hurricane damage to Mar-a-Lago, his private club in Palm ... FILE - In this Jan. 22, 2005 file photo, the entrance of Mar-a-Lago in West Palm Beach, Fla. Donald Trump received a $17 million insurance payment in 2005 for hurricane damage to Mar-a-Lago, his private club in Palm Beach, but The Associated Press found little evidence of such large-scale damage. (AP Photo/Alan Diaz, File) MORE LESS
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The Department of Homeland Security will release Mar-a-Lago visitor records as part of an ongoing lawsuit from three watchdog groups.

In a statement on its website, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) said it would make the records public “upon receiving them by September 8th.”

On April 10, CREW, the National Security Archive and the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University sued the Department of Homeland Security for visitor records to the White House, Trump Tower and President Donald Trump’s private Mar-a-Lago club, which frequently hosts official business including diplomatic visits by foreign leaders.

The suit, filed in the Southern District of New York, cited multiple Freedom of Information Act requests that it alleged had been ignored by the Secret Service.

According to CREW, the DHS has said that it has no visitor records for Trump Tower, Trump’s New York City home base that was vaulted into the news yet again last week when Donald Trump Jr. revealed he met with a Russian lawyer and others there after being promised damaging information on Hillary Clinton as part of a Russian government effort to aide his father’s campaign.

The lawsuit for the White House’s visitor records, the group said, was ongoing.

“The public deserves to know who is coming to meet with the president and his staff,” CREW Executive Director Noah Bookbinder said in the statement on the group’s website Monday. “We are glad that as a result of this case, this information will become public for meetings at his his personal residences—but it needs to be public for meetings at the White House as well.”

“It’s a promising first step that the Department of Homeland Security has agreed to release information on Mar-a-Lago’s visitors, but what might be in these disclosures is a mystery,” Alex Abdo, senior staff attorney at the Knight Institute, said in a statement. “The government does not appear to keep regular records of presidential visitors to Mar-a-Lago or Trump Tower, and it continues to argue that it need not disclose more formal records of visitors to the White House. In our view, the Freedom of Information Act requires the government to make this information – which relates to who exerts influence over the president — available to the public, and we intend to fight for its release.”

CREW sued the Obama White House for the same records, resulting in the administration releasing that information on an ongoing basis beginning in 2009.

The Trump administration announced in April that it would stop releasing White House visitor data.

Read the latest court order below:

This post has been updated.

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Notable Replies

  1. Speaking of “Kremlin by the Sea”, Did Donald get scared of visiting it, after all the publicity it got ?

  2. These logs will be SO HEAVILY REDACTED as to be completely useless. Watch.

    What I want to see is the Mar-A-Lago MEMBERSHIP LIST AND WHAT THEY ALL PAID FOR IT and who ACTUALLY paid the fees, i.e. what FOREIGN GOVERNMENT ENTITY outright bribed the President of the United States for access to him.

  3. Avatar for lok52 lok52 says:

    Actually I believe the season ended. Gets hot in Florida in July, so the rich folk head north.

  4. What’s the over-under** on the number of "Georgina Spelvin"s, "Alana Smithee"s and “Jane Smiths”?

    **No pun intended

  5. OK, thanks, didn’t think of that.

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