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The story is that the release of visitor logs is scheduled for the last Friday of every month, and this was moved up because of the Thanksgiving holiday, but nonetheless, the White House released a document dump right before Thanksgiving of another 1,600 records of visits to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
The records include visits through August 31 of this year. Norm Eisen, a special counsel to the President for ethics and government reform, has more:
Several of the most frequent White House visitors in today’s release are, not surprisingly, Administration officials who come to the White House as part of their daily work. For example, Tom Perrelli and Spencer Overton – each an appointed official in the Administration – have visited the White House many times.
Finally, as we noted last month, sometimes rather than providing clear information transparency can have confusing or amusing results. With an average of 100,000 White House access records created each month, many White House Visitors share the same name as celebrities. In October, requests were submitted for the names of some notable figures (for example Michael Jordan and Michael Moore). The famous individuals with those names never actually came to the White House, but we have included the individuals that did visit and share those names.
The searchable database of visitor records, including the date of the meeting and the purpose of the visit, can be found here.
…at a certain level, I don’t know if this really tells us a whole lot. It’s great that I know that Olympia Snowe met with the President and the First Lady back in June, or that the CEO of Chevron has been to the White House five times, or that Brent Scowcroft met with National Security Advisor James Jones twice, or that Bob Rubin met with Valerie Jarrett and Larry Summers over the summer, or that Markos Moulitsas has been in the White House twice, or that Colin Powell met with the President in May. But what am I actually getting from that? What patterns arise? I think there can be value in this raw data, but it requires a lot of scrutiny and some educated guessing.
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The AP did take a look at them, David, and came up with this:
AP: White House ‘met early and often with lobbyists’ on health care
LINK.
As I said, this doesn’t tell us much about what was discussed, and a lot of that we knew already – we know all about a PhRMa deal, and that they often visited the WH to hammer it out. The story you cite shows that a single-payer advocate visited the White House, and I don’t know if that signals much about the White House’s thinking on the subject.
It’s just data, disconnected from context.
quel surprise they make it a holiday news dump
Yes, but it would be irresponsible not to speculate.
I should go visit the White House
It’s been a real pain to have a smart ass father who though it would be a real scream to be the only person I’ve ever heard of get named after an economist he wasn’t related by blood.
Maybe all this hassle would have been worth it if I can arrange for Adam Smith to rise from the grave and pay the President a visit.
Wonder what the tea-baggers would say about that?
yeh about 575 times.
Now I understand why hcr sucks and is a huge gift to the ins. companies.
I downloaded the raw data. It’s interesting. There are 2,096 records for this release. I sorted by WHO was being visited in the WH.
Rahm was visited (at least recorded visitors) 82 times. The person who saw Rahm most was Lee Sachs, 7 times; 5 in April, 1 each in May and June.
Followed by Podesta, 4 times.
hmm. Sadly, I’m not sure we needed to see any logs to know that much.
One of the Podestas has been in the White House a huge number of times, his lobbying firm had something like 26 visits in previous releases of the log.
Here’s an idea. How about We the People (300 million of us) get to have an advocate, and for every time an industry lobbyist gets into the White House, our person gets a visit as well. Sounds fair to me….
In fact Lee Sachs is the most frequently recorded visitor to the WH at 62 recorded times. He met mostly with Diana Farrel, then Larry Summers.
He’s a counselor to Geithner evidently
!!
I think some allowance has to be made for people like that visiting often. There’s no shortage of FOBs in this admin and among them he’s the consummate insider.
What did Markos do there twice? Did Jane get a visit?
I know, somewhat tantalizing, isn’t it?
There are hundreds upon hundreds of names though. I wish I had a “hotlist” of names to look for so I could narrow this list down. (I just don’t recognize most of them, and you know there has to be some scumbags in there.)
It’d be nice if there was a WH Org Chart in list form too
It would be interesting then to cross reference the visitor with the visitee with data from OpenSecrets.
Markos was with 79 people on a staff tour of the Residence on May 26.
On 2/27 he was with Priya Singh in the Press lobby.
No Jane!
I think you underestimate the value of these logs. These logs create a background against which to check other statements, the importance of which would rarely be known at the time these logs come out. Among the things, they are also a check on whether the president’s public statements are correct. Are these logs accurate or have they been culled for visits the president doesn’t want disclosed? Even Rove and Cheney can’t be in two places at once. I’m sure Marcy will be able to include information from them in her time lines and analyses, as will anyone else hoping to replicate the work of Izzy Stone.
I read somewhere else that Tom Donohue, the douchebag oligarch who runs the US Chamber, has been in the White House 12 times. Some frenemy!
A little late for this thread but, just as long as Kissinger isn’t on it.