On Feb. 28, 2017, about a month after his inauguration, President Trump signed HJ Resolution 40, a bill that made it easier for people with mental illness to obtain guns. The picture was then requested by CBS News and was ignored to a total of 12 times.
After about two months on April 19, 2017, Sarah Huckabee Sanders the White House Press Secretary responded to repeated emails and phone calls with one line “We don’t plan to release the picture at this time.”
A White House correspondent confirmed that these photos won’t be seen unless the Trump administration wants them to be seen. Because the White House is not subject to the Freedom of Information Act.
The White House normally makes releases of its own pictures of bill and resolution signings. The press is often invited into the Oval Office in those situations and journalists shoot their own footage and photographs of the event, which are then distributed to all of the major news organizations.
Trump signed another bill the same day that rolled back an Obama administration rule on the Waters of the United States which was attended by a cabinet official in an official signing ceremony in the Roosevelt Room. Pool cameras took photos, as did the White House.
HJ Resolution 40 was indoctrinated 10 days after President Trump’s inauguration. In a town where legislation often lie dormant for months, the bill moved quickly to the president’s desk within weeks, thanks to the Congressional Review Act, an obscure law that allows Congress to review and repeal new regulations.
President Obama had pushed for the ruling around the time of the Sandy Hook massacre and it went into effect in December 2016. If it had remained in effect, 75,000 names of mentally ill Americans would have been added to a database that stopped them from buying a gun.
On the day the bill was signed, the National Rifle Association (NRA) put out a press release quoting NRA Executive Director Chris Cox: “Today marks a new era for law-abiding gun owners, as we have now have a president who respects and supports our right to keep and bear arms.”
The NRA release says that had the Obama rule been allowed to move ahead it “would have resulted in 75,000 Social Security recipients who use a representative payee losing their Second Amendment rights without due process.”
But in fact, the rule applied to Social Security invalids who were unable to take care of their obligations because of “marked subnormal intelligence, or mental illness, incompetency, condition, or disease.”
The NRA added that the move to revoke the rule was supported by “the ACLU, and more than a dozen mental health advocacy organizations.”
On Thursday morning CBS News asked the White House again if it would release the photo of the signing, but received no response.