CREW Sues Secret Service Over Visitor Logs

Membership Ticker

Monika Bauerlein, CEO

Dear reader,

This is big. $25 million big. I'm excited to write to you about The Moment for Mother Jones: a five-year push to make key investments and strengthen our work at a time when journalism faces threats—both political and economic—like never before. We’ve raised more than 90 percent of our $25 million goal, and now that we're in the homestretch, we're asking the entire MoJo community to be part of it. Read more about The Moment and please join us with a donation today: Your gift will be matched dollar for dollar, up to $500,000 total.

$500,000 MATCHING GIFT: Join The Moment for Mother Jones and your gift will be DOUBLED as part of this special, five-year effort to strengthen our journalism at a time when it’s needed like never before.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), a DC non profit, announced Wednesday that it is suing the Secret Service because the Obama administration is following Bush-era practice and refusing to release White House visitor logs. CREW wants to know which health care executives were visiting the White House, and when. The Most Transparent Administration Ever^TM doesn’t want to tell. So now we get a lawsuit. The White House doesn’t really have a leg to stand on here: even if it could make the legal case that it should be able to withhold the visitor logs, there’s no way it can make the good government case. The president serves the public; the public should know who has his ear. The only reason the White House is getting away with withholding these records for now is that the media (and Congress) don’t seem to care enough to draw attention to it.