Transparency Is Not Situational

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On Wednesday, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), a DC non profit, announced it was suing the Secret Service over the Obama administration’s inexcusable refusal to publicly release White House visitor logs. The president was asked about his broken transparency promises last night, and made some pretty sorry excuses, explaining he had sent a letter to CREW with some of the names of insurance executives who had visited the White House. That’s totally missing the point, of course. The point is that White House visitor logs should be a matter of public record, especially now that The Most Transparent Administration In HistoryTM is in office. Over to CREW:

[T]ransparency is not situational. It is not sufficient for the White House to release certain visitor records shortly before a press conference to avoid distraction… Releasing some records because it is politically expedient to do so is not transparency.

This should be a no-brainer.

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DONALD TRUMP & DEMOCRACY

Mother Jones was founded to do journalism differently. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after stories others don’t. We’re a nonprofit newsroom, because the kind of truth-telling investigations we do doesn’t happen under corporate ownership.

And we need your support like never before, to fight back against the existential threats American democracy faces. Fundraising for nonprofit media is always a challenge, and we need all hands on deck right now. We have no cushion; we leave it all on the field.

It’s reader support that enables Mother Jones to report the facts that are too difficult, expensive, or inconvenient for other news outlets to uncover. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

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