Judge rules against White House on visitor logs

A federal judge on Monday rejected a Bush administration argument for shielding records of White House visits by prominent religious conservatives.

U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth ruled that visitor logs from the White House and Vice President Dick Cheney’s residence are subject to Freedom of Information Act requests. The Secret Service creates the records and is subject to Freedom of Information Act requests.

{mosads}The Bush administration, however, had ordered that the logs be turned over to the White House and treated as presidential records, which would protect them from public-records law.

In a lawsuit brought by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), a liberal watchdog group, Lamberth ordered the Secret Service to turn over visitor logs regarding nine conservative religious commentators, including James Dobson, Gary Bauer and Jerry Falwell, according to an Associated Press report.

Lamberth said he did not have the authority to rule on a second CREW lawsuit seeking to render illegal the White House’s destruction of log records provided by the Secret Service. That lawsuit involved logs of White House visits by disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) is leading his own investigation into White House interactions with Abramoff. He has demanded that the White House hand over more than 600 pages of documents related to Abramoff’s activities.

Since the Abramoff scandal broke, Bush and White House officials have tried to distance themselves from the fallen powerbroker. The president has said he did not know the lobbyist, and the White House has stated that Abramoff only attended a couple of holiday receptions and “a few staff-level meetings on top of that.”

Former top Bush adviser Karl Rove acknowledged through a spokesman that the two had met in the early 1990s, but described Abramoff only as a “casual acquaintance.”

In a letter to White House counsel Fred Fielding in late October, Waxman said his committee’s review of thousands of documents obtained from Abramoff’s former firm, Greenberg Traurig, raises questions about these assertions.