Darn those celebrities who need to get hussled in/out of Trump properties… more legal impediments for transparency as Biglygate continues. Those national security and executive privilege excuses will come sooner than later.
Since Obama took office in 2009, the White House has been voluntarily publishing a visitor log online, releasing the data about three months after the visits take place. That delay poses a curious problem: given the change of power taking place today, about 110 days-worth of data is stuck in limbo.
Officials with the Obama White House and the National Archives—which is assuming legal custody of Obama's presidential records—say they're improvising a fix that will allow the remaining records to go public soon without waiting the five years or more before a former president's records typically begin to be released.
"As part of the President's commitment to unprecedented transparency during his time in office, we have voluntarily posted on our website more than 5.99 million records of visitors to the White House over the past eight years. In conjunction with the transition, those records, along with the small number of remaining visitor records that have yet to be processed, will be transmitted to the National Archives and Records Administration," White House spokeswoman Brandi Hoffine told POLITICO.
"In order to ensure that the records that have yet to be processed are available to the public in a timely manner, we are working with the National Archives to develop a process for publishing the remaining records as early as possible, allowing individuals to review these visitor records as they did in the normal course during the Obama Administration," she added.
National Archives spokeswoman Miriam Kleiman confirmed that personnel there are working to resolve the issue of the late-term visitor data. "NARA intends to work with the Office of Former President Obama to facilitate the release of the remaining Obama White House Visitor Access Records," she said.
The nearly six million Obama visitor records already made public at this page are expected to move to an Archives-run historical site shortly.