To his credit, he warned us. Over a week ago, Scott McClellan told reporters that the Secret Service logs of [tag]Jack Abramoff[/tag]’s [tag]White House[/tag] visits may not be the complete story.
The Secret Service’s records documenting convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff’s contacts with [tag]Bush[/tag] administration officials may not reveal all such meetings, the White House said Tuesday. […] “I don’t know exactly what they’ll be providing, but they only have certain records and so I just wouldn’t view it as a complete historical record,” McClellan said.
He got that right. The “logs” were released yesterday and they showed a whopping two visits by Abramoff to the White House. Just two.
Paul Kiel, who called yesterday’s release “a joke,” noted that these records “don’t account for any of the meetings the White House has publicly confirmed: Hannukah receptions in 2001 and 2002, as well as the infamous May 9, 2001, “$25,000 Meeting,” of which we have a picture.
OK, so why are the Secret Service records woefully incomplete, omitting Abramoff visits the White House has already acknowledged?
A White House spokeswoman, Erin Healy, said she could offer no explanation of why the records released Wednesday did not reflect all of the visits by Mr. Abramoff that the White House had previously acknowledged. Asked if officials might have approved Mr. Abramoff’s entry without requiring him to register at White House security posts, Ms. Healy declined comment. “I have nothing for you on that,” she said.
As it turns out, the White House may be playing word games. In this case, it depends on what the meaning of “record” is.
Judicial Watch sued the White House for the records and, as part of a court-approved deal, the Bush gang agreed to order the Secret Service to release records of Abramoff’s visits, including, presumably, when Abramoff was at the White House, how long he was there, and who signed him in for the visit.
Except that’s not quite how it turned out. According to the NYT, the White House “decided that the settlement of the lawsuit did not require other, more complete visitor logs to be made public.”
They said the more complete logs, known within the White House as Waves records, an acronym for the Workers Appointments and Visitors Entry System, would have identified the other visits by Mr. Abramoff.
The conservative group that sought the logs in the lawsuit, Judicial Watch, which has often championed open-government causes, suggested that it might return to court. The group’s president, Tom Fitton, said the White House had decided to “[tag]cherry-pick[/tag] the information.”
The Bush White House cherry-picking information that suits its own political purposes? Where have I heard that before?