Trump ordered to release Mar-a-Lago visitor logs after court ruling

President's predecessors also sought to keep visitor logs secret

Mr Trump's visitor records while at Mar-a-Lago will become available (JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images)

A court has ordered Donald Trump to release the visitor logs from his Mar-a-Lago residence amid an ongoing lawsuit to gain access to records of who is visiting with the President.

The President has hosted foreign leaders during seven visits to the resort - known as the 'Winter White House' - this year.

While he has so far resisted calls to reveal who has been visiting the Florida property, a US District Court for the Southern District of New York ruled the records must be released by 8 September.

It came amid a legal challenge brought by a non-profit watchdog group.

“The public deserves to know who is coming to meet with the president and his staff,” Noah Bookbinder, the executive director for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (Crew), one of the parties suing, said in a statement.

“We are glad that as a result of this case, this information will become public for meetings at his personal residences — but it needs to be public for meetings at the White House as well.”

Crew is joined by the National Security Archive, and the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, in suing the Department of Homeland Security to release the visitor logs. The logs are expected to be released in September.

Mr Trump is hardly the first US president to resist releasing visitor log information. His predecessor, Barack Obama, initially claimed that the logs were presidential information, so they were either privileged or generally off-limits to the public. Former President George W Bush, too, initially resisted handing over the visitor logs.

Mr Obama, who had campaigned saying that he would have one of the most transparent administrations in the history of the presidency, later yielded to the criticism and opened up the visitor logs to the public. Crew also sued the Obama administration for access to those records.

But, while the Obama administration did release those records, critics noted that they weren’t as useful as they could have been. The records were released in long lists that failed to note why the visitors were there. That made it difficult to determine who was speaking to the President and his staff, since the exact identity of any individual visitor could be difficult to determine.

Mr Trump has spent quite a bit of time at his Mar-a-Lago properties since his inauguration in January.

In just his first 100 days, he spent nearly a quarter of his time at his beach side resort. Since then, and as the weather has gotten warmer in New York and New Jersey, the President has switched up his private retreats and often spends weekends in his Bedminster, New Jersey golf club, or in his New York City residence in Trump Tower.

Government officials have indicated there had been no records kept of visitors to Trump Tower.