Secrecy carried too far

Wednesday, April 23, 2008 | 2:07 a.m.

An effort is under way by the Bush administration to prevent people, including members of Congress, from learning who is meeting on a day-to-day basis with the president and vice president.

The fight is over records of visitors entering and leaving the White House and the vice president’s residence. These records are kept by the U.S. Secret Service, an agency that is subject to the Freedom of Information Act.

Because the White House’s own records are not subject to the law, members of Congress, reporters, members of advocacy groups and others who have wanted to review visitations have traditionally relied upon access to the Secret Service records.

That has proved to be difficult with Bush in the White House, a fact learned by the group Judicial Watch in January 2006. It sent an FOIA request to the Secret Service, seeking logs that would show how many times the corrupt lobbyist Jack Abramoff had visited the White House. The group had to file a lawsuit before it could pry the records loose five months later.

Within days of turning over those records, White House officials internally adopted a policy that the Secret Service visitor logs would thereafter be secret. This information came to light only last fall, when the White House used the policy in court to justify withholding records from a group called Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

The group filed suit when records were withheld that would show how many times President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney had met with certain high-profile Christian conservatives.

A federal court ruled the records were open. The administration appealed, and arguments were heard Monday. The federal appellate judges, while criticizing CREW for not addressing presidential powers in its lawsuit, seemed open to the point that Secret Service visitor logs are public.

One judge said if Bush could close Secret Service records he could close the records of other federal agencies, such as the budget office.

Our view is that Bush and Cheney should be stopped cold in their all-encompassing quest for secrecy. Classified material is one thing. But matters such as who’s stopping by for a meeting are altogether different.