Trump Declines to Release List of His Mar-a-Lago Visitors
But CREW and its partners argued that because the presidential visitor records are typically maintained by the Secret
Service — which is part of the Department of Homeland Security — they should not be exempt from public release.
Instead, on Friday the Justice Department released a State Department list of just 22 names — all of them members of
the delegation of the Japanese prime minister — who visited the club in February for a meeting with President Trump.
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration on Friday escalated a battle with government ethics groups by declining to release the identities of individuals
visiting with President Trump at his family’s Mar-a-Lago resort during the days he has spent at the private club in Palm Beach, Fla., this year.
The surprising move by the Department of Justice, which had been ordered in July by a federal court to complete its review of Mar-a-Lago visitor records, came after weeks of promotion by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the liberal nonprofit group known as CREW,
that it would soon be getting the Mar-a-Lago visitors logs.
CREW and its partners in the effort — the National Security Archive
and the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University — sued in April to get access to presidential visitor logs for Mar-a-Lago, the White House and Trump Tower in New York.