White House incoming press secretary Jen Psaki on Friday declined to specify whether President Joe Biden would resume the tradition of publishing White House visitor files after Biden was inaugurated next week.
Psaki, who attended an information session of the Biden transition team on Friday afternoon, was asked if her team would resume the release of visitor files after President Trump stopped the practice during his term. In response, Psaki said the Biden government wanted to ‘ensure that we are transparent’, but was not committed to publishing the logbooks.
“I would not expect many visitors in the early months, especially not because of COVID,” Psaki said during the event. “It will be quite limited, but we will have more to say about it soon.”
Psaki added that the White House press team has ‘more to say’ about its ethics policy in the coming days. Biden will be sworn in as president next Wednesday.
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The Trump administration stopped releasing the White House visitor files for public consumption in 2017, citing national security.
The decision was a reversal of the Obama era to publish the logbooks and caused a series of lawsuits from groups that wanted to force the government to disclose them. The Clinton and Bush administrations also restricted access to visitor files.
A communications director in the White House during the Obama administration, Psaki was critical of Trump’s refusal to publish the logs over the past year. In 2017, Psaki praised former Obama administration office Ned Price for ‘calling Trump’s bluff’ about the security risks of releasing the stumps in an open foreign policy post.
In a 2019 tweet, Psaki said the Obama administration’s policy of releasing the logs ‘was a headache at the time’, but ‘good for democracy’.