According to ABC News, the White House and the Secret Service “quietly signed an agreement last spring in the midst of the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal declaring that records identifying visitors to the White House are not open to the public.”  The agreement is in the form of a five-page document dated May 17 declaring that “all entry and exit data on White House visitors belongs to the White House as presidential records rather than to the Secret Service as agency records. Therefore, the agreement states, the material is not subject to public disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act.”

Are we hiding the names of people with access to the President because we don’t want to embarrass the visitors?  No, it’s actually because we don’t want to embarrass the President by disclosing the people with whom he’s been spending time.

With whom has Bush been spending time?  Criminals like Jack Abramoff, who visited Bush in 2003 and–well, we don’t actually know when else, because this sort of information is secret.  Citizens for Reponsibility and Ethics In Washington (CREW) has just released the above photo. It’s a happy pose.  The expressions of Abramoff and Bush don’t evoke the spirit of Scott McClellan’s: “The President does not know him, nor does the President recall ever meeting him.”  If the President doesn’t really know Abramoff, this means that I can walk into the White House and arrange for Bush to pose like this with me too.

We don’t want any more photos like this, do we?  That would distract us from our so-called war on terror.