Late in December, a House committee posted a spreadsheet with seven full days of White House visitor logs from the weeks before the riot on January 6.
The committee released hundreds of documents online last month as it concluded its inquiry, including the Excel spreadsheets. Politico posted the documents in a searchable format and conducted an analysis to reveal the visitor manifests that Donald Trump had spent his entire presidency attempting to hide.
The logs are not exhaustive; they only cover the days of December 12, 14, 18, and 21, 2020, followed by January 3-5, 2021. They also do not specify the precise goals of the visits or use visitors’ names alone to identify them.
The logs do, however, shed new light on events covered by the Jan. 6 investigation, including the tumultuous Oval Office meeting on Dec. 18, where outside advisers like Sidney Powell and Patrick Byrne suggested seizing voting machines, and they give a list of those who met with Trump in the final weeks of his presidency, including Fox News broadcasters.
The records also show that several painters and photographers went to the president’s private home at that time for unknown reasons and that five employees of then-Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) studied documents that Trump wanted to declassify.
Some of the entries in the document from when the select committee made it public on January 6 have been taken out to protect people’s privacy. We also got rid of White House tour records, which made up a big chunk of the data but rarely had a visitor of public interest, unless there was something very unusual, like the December 12 tour that Proud Boys Chair Enrique Tarrio took.
The dates listed in the visitor records are December 12, 2020, December 14, 2020, December 18, 2020, December 21, 2020, January 3, 2021, January 4, 2021, and January 5, 2021.
At the time, certain visits were made public knowledge. Others can be explained by their timing, occurring in the midst of the Covid epidemic and the White House laying off employees in preparation for the transfer of power, at least among those who are not part of Trump’s inner circle.
However, even these scant glimpses offer a peek into how Trump’s White House truly functioned, with a diverse range of visitors—both political and non-political—sifting in and out.
For instance, a completely different group of visitors were being carried into the East Wing of the building as five members of then-Rep. Devin Nunes’ (R-Calif.) staff on the House Intelligence Committee were being led into the West Wing to review materials Trump intended to declassify. The reason why several artists and photographers visited the president’s private residence as Jan. 6 drew near is still unknown.
