Trump Just Said He Won’t Release Visitors Logs. ACLU’s Response Is Epic
The American Civil Liberties Union today blasted the Trump Administration’s decision to not publish the White House visitor logs as President Obama regularly did, charging that, “The only reasonable conclusion is to believe the Trump administration has many things it is trying to hide.”
In a statement issued from its Washington, D.C. office, ACLU Political Director Faiz Shakir wrote that, “Elected officials work for the people and we deserve to see government business conducted in transparent daylight. This ‘Good Friday’ news dump is simply the latest in a series of efforts by President Trump to avoid public accountability, and it’s not the way to improve the people’s declining trust in this administration.”
It clearly isn’t a surprise to Shakir that Trump won’t reveal who comes to visit him at the White House, at Mar-A-Lago or elsewhere. It continues an unacceptable pattern of behavior.
“Trump has bullied the press when they report on him,” Sharkir’s statement concludes. “He has promoted the reporting of fake and outright false information. has imposed gags on federal employees in the earliest days of his administration. He has avoided disclosing his tax records, and he has avoided releasing information about his conflicts of interest.”
Last month, four Democratic Senators introduced a bill to force Trump and all future Presidents to be transparent about who they meet with, where ever the meetings take place.
The Make Access Records Available to Lead American Government Openness Act – which was immediately dubbed the MAR-A-LAGO Act in honor of Trump’s penchant for doing business at his Florida resort – away from the Washington politicians and media – would be a step forward in the quest for democratic practices.
However, it has virtually no chance of passing the Republican-dominated Congress and now obviously would be vetoed by Trump if it ever got to his desk.
At a time polls show fewer and fewer people trust anything Trump says, this is just more evidence that he really is hiding things that if brought out into the daylight would make him even more repellent to fair-minded citizens across the nation.
