building with reasonable withholding. those privacy concerns, if they existed today, they existed six months ago when president obama was president. there is no reason for them not to continue this unless they want to continue looking as if they are trying to hide something. here is a president who is so transparent in ways you would not expect. he will do interviews and tell you what he is thinking and eating at the time he is thinking it. yet, whether it is conflict of interest or the visitor log or taxes, he s unnaturally s lly secretive about them. it is all about the juxtaposition. it doesn t mean he is being candid. the ho-hum of hypocrisy here. snl couldn t love it anymore
thank you for being here. emily, is transparency overrated? absolutely not. and i think the president needs to consider who his base is. we are inherently distrustful of the government. that is important. want to be the president that gets away with not releasing his tax return, that a significant. the people voted him into office without seeing his tax returns, if you want to get away without looking at 20-20, he cannot give them space to build against him as a massively un-transparent president. they have to excel to be transparent. like the drafting of a health care law, like the lobbyists working with administration. he has to excel at those opportunities. white house visitor log was not a good sign, but time for him to improve. jon: as you well know, president obama was one of the most transparent administrations in history, but it was anything but. he did have the white house visitor logs that were available for public expression
yet. we ve got a lot of tools and conversations that are on going. we ve had very productive direction that we ve seen china move in. i think there s an agreement by everyone so far in that a nuclear capable north korea is not in anybody s best interest. i think we re going to continue to work with the chinese in particular on this case. was there a review of the white house visitor log? i m sorry? what was the extent of the view of the white house visitor log? what made you change your mind and not continue releasing them? as was noted on friday, we are following the same policy that every administration from the beginning of time has used with respect to visitors log. we will comply with the federal records act as stated by law. why does the president object to people knowing who is coming into the white house? it s not a question of objecting. it s about following the law. we are following the law as the presidential records act and the
that? reporter: good i don t know that it s available to any member of congress for sure. i do know it s available to any member here at the white house specifically. there are rare exceptions under national security situations the names could be removed or potentially purged here. but former national security council advisers, even the former spokesperson with whom i spoke, tells me it would be very easy information to access if sean spicer wanted to provide that for better transparency. it doesn t indicate who the source is. i think you can find out publicly. they haven t put the records out yet. so we can t. we re trying. and spicer obviously knows or is choosing not to know, which is even more disturbing. if you were vice president of the united states and i was coming to visit you, you would have to tell the appropriate people that i was coming to visit you. that is correct. as far as this information being available it s called a visitor log. you sign in. that s w
information. for example, devin nunes saying revealing how he got in the white house is somehow sources and methods relating to intelligence is completely ridiculous. that s a visitor log. pardon me, that is not intelligence and not sources and methods for how you intercept russian communication. there s a second questions i mention earlier. did the people who revealed this information, were they authorized to reveal it. i think one reason the white house in the past couple of hours has said everybody can see it is because they don t want to answer that question. why didn t you say that three days ago? i think it is because you weren t authorized to reveal it to all of these people. i think the coverup is killing em and i think the questions will get harder and harder to answer. they will not be questions about the congress. they will be questions about white house conduct. and all of a sudden they invite the republican and democrat leaders of the committees to come over as the new