Will the Obama White House make its visitor logs public? Administration officials have launched a formal review in the wake of a lawsuit filed Tuesday by a Washington ethics group that has been trying to gain access under the Freedom of Information Act to a list of those who have come to see administration officials in recent months. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics, who previously sued the Bush administration for similar records, had requested names of any coal executives who have visited Obama officials during the first few months of the administration. The request was denied, as was a similar request to the administration from MSNBC, which asked for the names of everybody who had visited the White House since Inauguration Day. Asked about the logs during the press briefing today, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said the policy is under review by the White House Counsel's office, though he declined to say how long the review could last. Asked if the administration still seeks to be more transparent than previous White Houses—a key Obama campaign promise--Gibbs replied, “I think we ran on that.”

The logs are maintained by the Secret Service, but the Obama administration has argued, as the Bushies did, that the visitor logs have historically fallen under the Presidential Records Act. That means they would be exempt from FOIA requests and would not made public until years after a president has left office. But that argument was twice rejected by a federal judge during the Bush years. Still no White House has ever released its complete visitors list, though there have been excerpts made public. Three years ago, the Bush White House, after some pressure from Congress and federal investigators, released information about when disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff and his associates visited the White House. Meanwhile, both the Clinton and Bush administrations gave reporters details on who slept overnight in the executive mansion and at Camp David. CREW has accused the Obama White House of basically adopting Bush administration policy. (Gee, where have we heard that one before?) At the briefing today, Gibbs seemed to go out of his way to suggest that this isn’t the Obama folks’s problem, that these records have been disputed for years and that they are reviewing “previous policy.” Your Gaggler’s translation: We’re not the bad guys here. But that’s a hard argument to make when your candidate campaigned for letting the sun shine in.