The White House is telling reporters it will keep secret the names of those who attended President Obama’s meeting with Muslim leaders on Wednesday.
“I don’t have a list of those who attended, but let me see if I can try to extract some more information from them for you,” spokesman Josh Earnest explained.
“The president has many meetings at the White House and certainly not all of them include some press coverage,” Earnest added.
By publishing the meeting on the White House schedule, Earnest said that “we were as transparent as we could be” and pointed to a “blog post” that he hoped would “characterize the discussion that occurred.”
The post was written written by a comedian who attended the meeting and published an essay late yesterday, ridiculing Republicans in the Daily Beast.
As White House reporters pressed Earnest, he admitted that the records would eventually end up in the White House Visitor Access records, as is now customary for the Obama administration.
That process, however, can take months. It could be May before the records are finally released to the public.
When asked if by Fox News reporter Ed Henry why the administration wouldn’t release a list now, Earnest replied that he would try to speed up the release process of the visitor records.