White House announces it will keep its visitor logs secret

President Donald Trump's White House will not release visitor logs detailing who enters the White House complex, administration officials told Time Friday.

The decision, a split from the preceding administration of President Barack Obama, came after months of speculation about what Trump's administration would do with the records.

White House communications director Michael Dubke told Time the reversal from the Obama administration's policy was in the name of "the grave national security risks and privacy concerns of the hundreds of thousands of visitors annually."

The logs, which are maintained by the Secret Service, will be under wraps for at least five years after Trump leaves office. Trump officials made a point to note to Time that the Obama White House fought in court to keep elements of its logs, which were at times incomplete, redacted or withheld. Obama officials often took steps to get around the records, six million of which were voluntarily released by the administration, by meeting with individuals off the White House grounds, as Time noted.

Over the past few months, White House press secretary Sean Spicer was pressed repeatedly about when the Trump administration would be publishing the visitor logs.

"We're reviewing that now," he told a reporter in late March.

"I think we should have an answer on our policy very shortly on that," he said earlier this week when asked.

In March, a slew of Democratic lawmakers introduced the MAR-A-LAGO Act, which would require disclosure of the visitor logs at the White House and Trump properties where the president frequents for government business.

"It's simple: the American people have a right to know who has access to the president and who has leverage over this administration," Sen. Tom Udall of New Mexico said in a statement. "By refusing to release the White House visitor logs, President Trump is only validating the rampant concerns about who may be pulling the levers in his administration."

"The American people need to know who has access to the White House if we're going to 'drain the swamp,'" Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island said in the statement. "So far, all we've seen from the President is murk."

Earlier this week, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the National Security Archive and the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University sued the Department of Homeland Security - which is the department containing the Secret Service - for the visitor logs at the White House, Mar-a-Lago, and Trump Tower.

"We hoped that the Trump administration would follow the precedent of the Obama administration and continue to release visitor logs, but unfortunately they have not," CREW Executive Director Noah Bookbinder said in a statement. "Given the many issues we have already seen in this White House with conflicts of interest, outside influence, and potential ethics violations, transparency is more important than ever, so we had no choice but to sue."