President Donald Trump has kept White House visitor logs under wraps after eight years of transparency from President Barack Obama, but beginning this week voters will get a peek, at least, at the comings and goings on campus, POLITICO’s Lorraine Woellert reports. The Secret Service released a set of heavily redacted visitor logs Wednesday as part of a legal settlement between the Trump administration and watchdog group Public Citizen, which had sued under the Freedom of Information Act to obtain records of four agencies housed inside the White House compound: the offices of Management and Budget, Science and Technology Policy and National Drug Control Policy, and the Council on Environmental Quality.
The logs track visitors for the month of February, which included conservative think-tank types Myron Ebell and Marlo Lewis of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, David Kreutzer of the Heritage Foundation and Jim Tozzi of the Center for Regulatory Effectiveness. Trump administration loyalist C. Boyden Gray dropped in twice to chat with Mark Paoletta, the former veep chief counsel who’s now at OMB. Ellen Lurie Hoffman of the National Housing Trust paid a visit to OMB’s civil service wing.
Here is a recent Think Tank Watch post about how more than 125 Trump staffers have come from think tanks.