Trump Declines to Release List of His Mar-a-Lago Visitors<br />But CREW and its partners argued that because the presidential visitor records are typically maintained by the Secret<br />Service — which is part of the Department of Homeland Security — they should not be exempt from public release.<br />Instead, on Friday the Justice Department released a State Department list of just 22 names — all of them members of<br />the delegation of the Japanese prime minister — who visited the club in February for a meeting with President Trump.<br />WASHINGTON — The Trump administration on Friday escalated a battle with government ethics groups by declining to release the identities of individuals<br />visiting with President Trump at his family’s Mar-a-Lago resort during the days he has spent at the private club in Palm Beach, Fla., this year.<br />The surprising move by the Department of Justice, which had been ordered in July by a federal court to complete its review of Mar-a-Lago visitor records, came after weeks of promotion by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the liberal nonprofit group known as CREW,<br />that it would soon be getting the Mar-a-Lago visitors logs.<br />CREW and its partners in the effort — the National Security Archive<br />and the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University — sued in April to get access to presidential visitor logs for Mar-a-Lago, the White House and Trump Tower in New York.
