ProPublica
Here Are the White House Visitor Records the Trump Administration Didn’t Want You to See
By Derek Kravitz, Leora Smith and Al Shaw, November 21, 2017
The Trump White House tried to block public access to visitor logs of five federal offices working directly for the president even though they were subject to public disclosure through the Freedom of Information Act. Property of the People, a Washington-based transparency group, successfully sued the administration to release the data and provided the documents to ProPublica. You can search them below. Related: Koch Lobbyists and Opus Dei — Who’s Dropping in on Trump Budget Czar Mick Mulvaney? | About the data | Download the data
If you have information about these meetings, or who attended them, contact us at visitors@propublica.org or via Signal at (573) 239-7440. Here's how to leak to ProPublica.
230 Days
2,169 Redactions
8,807 Meetings
CLICK ON THE FOLLOWING TO SEE THE FULL VISITOR LOG ON MULVANEY:https://projects.propublica.org/graphics/wh-complex
About the Data
The White House complex -- formally called the Executive Office of the President, or EOP -- is made up of more than a dozen offices and about 4,000 staffers who craft White House policy and support the president. It includes the White House itself, the National Security Council, the Office of Management and Budget, and other federal agencies.
Property of the People, a Washington-based nonprofit transparency group, successfully sued to force the administration to release the visitor logs and calendars of top agency officials from five agencies within the White House complex: the Office of Management and Budget; the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative; the Office of National Drug Control Policy; the Office of Science and Technology Policy; and the Council on Environmental Quality.
The court held that these agencies are subject to public disclosure through the Freedom of Information Act, even if the White House itself is not. The Trump administration refuses to release visitor logs for the White House, citing "grave national security risks and privacy concerns of the hundreds of thousands of visitors annually.”
The Obama White House also initially refused to release a list of its visitors, as had previous administrations. But in 2009, facing four lawsuits from government transparency groups and increasing public scrutiny, the Obama administration began voluntarily posting records of those who came in and out of the White House itself online.
The dataset covers the period between Jan. 20, the day of Trump’s inauguration, and about Sept. 6, although the date ranges differ by agency.
The government redacted the names of some White House complex visitors, citing privacy reasons. Property of the People and the government are negotiating for the release of names currently redacted in some of the visitor logs and calendars. We plan to publish additional data, likely disclosed on a quarterly basis, as it becomes available.
The government noted in its response to Property of the People’s open-records request that it couldn’t guarantee that every visitor’s name was logged. Because the visitor logs and calendars are produced by the agencies themselves, meeting details might be mislabeled or incorrect. In some cases, where we couldn’t confirm the proper spelling of handwritten names or other text, we noted entries as “illegible.”
Additional design and development by Sisi Wei
Koch Lobbyists and Opus Dei — Who’s Dropping in on Trump Budget Czar Mick Mulvaney?
The influential OMB director’s door is open to corporate and conservative interests, according to logs that the White House fought to keep secret.
Nov. 21, 1:56 p.m. EST
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Koch Lobbyists and Opus Dei — Who’s Dropping in on Trump Budget Czar Mick Mulvaney?
Mick Mulvaney, director of the Office of Management and Budget, attends a House Budget Committee hearing on President Donald Trump's fiscal 2018 budget proposal in Washington, D.C., on May 24. (Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
One of President Donald Trump’s top cabinet officials has met with a long list of lobbyists, corporate executives and wealthy people with business interests before the government, according to calendars the Trump administration fought to keep secret.
The calendars for Mick Mulvaney, the former South Carolina congressman who now runs the White House Office of Management and Budget, offer a glimpse of who has access to the highest levels of the Trump administration.
Among those visiting Mulvaney: Trump friend and casino magnate Steve Wynn; a flurry of officials from the conservative Heritage Foundation; a string of health care and Wall Street CEOs; lobbyists for Koch Industries; a cryptocurrency evangelist; and a prominent member of the Catholic group Opus Dei.
The Trump administration fought in court to block public records requests by Property of the People, a Washington-based nonprofit transparency group, to release the calendars as well as visitor logs from several other White House offices. Lawyers for the group ultimately prevailed and provided the documents to ProPublica, which we are posting in a searchable format.
As OMB director, Mulvaney is the driving force behind the president’s budget and influences regulations and government procurement. It’s been widely reported that he will become the acting head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. He also has the ear of the president, who is reportedly a fan of Mulvaney’s performances on the Sunday political shows. The calendars, which cover February to September, typically don’t include details on what was discussed at the meetings. In some cases, the timing of contact with Mulvaney line up with OMB business.
Mulvaney appeared on “Meet the Press” on Oct. 8. The president reportedly thinks Mulvaney does a good job on Sunday political shows. (William B. Plowman/NBC NewsWire via Getty Images)
“The OMB director is a member of the cabinet and also a senior adviser to the president — because of that, the director often spends a ton of time in the West Wing,” said Kenneth Baer, who was senior adviser and associate director at the agency for several years of the Obama administration.
The quickest way to get access to Mulvaney appears to be to hire his former congressional chief of staff, Al Simpson, who joined the lobbying firm Mercury in February.
Simpson had seven meetings and a phone call with Mulvaney in a four-month period, between April and August. He appears on Mulvaney’s calendars more frequently than anyone who is not a current government official. Often, Simpson brought lobbying clients with him, including representatives from building materials giant Cemex; pharma firm AmerisourceBergen; and BlueCross BlueShield of South Carolina. Those three firms paid Mercury $360,000 in the first nine months of the year, disclosure filings show.
A Mercury spokesman said: “The firm fully complies with all registration and disclosure requirements when representing clients.” The OMB press office did not respond to requests for comment.
In July, Simpson and Koch Industries lobbyists Brian Henneberry and Raymond Paul met with Mulvaney.
In other cases, billionaires themselves came in to meet with Mulvaney. They include Charles Schwab, medical entrepreneur Patrick Soon-Shiong and Wynn, the casino magnate whose relationship with Trump goes back decades. Wynn met with Mulvaney in April. Wynn’s firm has lobbied on tax issues on Capitol Hill. Wynn himself, who has large holdings in Macau, has reportedly been involved in pressing the Trump administration on China issues. Wynn was also named finance chairman of the Republican National Committee in January. Wynn’s spokesman declined to comment.
In late February, Mulvaney had a call with Eugene Scalia, the son of the late Supreme Court justice and a prominent lawyer at Gibson Dunn. At the time, Scalia was representing business groups that wanted OMB to delay the implementation of a regulation known as the fiduciary rule. Scalia didn’t respond to a request for comment. Many of his meetings with health care executives came as Republicans in Congress tried to repeal Obamacare.
Here Are the White House Visitor Records the Trump Administration Didn’t Want You to See
The Trump White House tried to block public access to visitor logs of five federal offices working directly for the president even though they were subject to public disclosure through the Freedom of Information Act. A Washington-based transparency group successfully sued the administration to release the data and provided the documents to ProPublica.
Mulvaney’s schedule is, to a large extent, a reflection of his politics. A former member of the House’s conservative Freedom Caucus, he recently told Politico, “I don’t think anyone in this administration is more of a right-wing conservative than I am.” (The same profile quoted Simpson, Mulvaney’s former chief of staff turned lobbyist, praising him.)
Mulvaney met with few, if any, consumer groups. That’s in contrast to President Barack Obama’s first OMB director, Peter Orszag, whose visitor logs show meetings with both a long string of corporate executives as well as philanthropic and consumer representatives.
Among the more surprising visitors to Mulvaney was Jeff Bell, a former Reagan aide who is marked on the calendar as being with the Catholic group Opus Dei. Bell told ProPublica that his March meeting with Mulvaney, a Catholic, covered “religious and political matters” but declined to comment further.
Another was Valery Vavilov, CEO of Bitfury, a tech company focused on cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. When Mulvaney was still in Congress last year, he co-founded a “blockchain caucus” to promote the technology behind Bitcoin
At the May meeting, “Mulvaney expressed his desire to encourage government use of blockchain and he asked our group for suggestions of simple use cases that could be a first step for government adoption,” a Bitfury spokesman told ProPublica.
Do you have information about Mick Mulvaney or the Office of Management and Budget? Contact Justin at justin@propublica.org or via Signal at 774-826-6240.
Above is from: https://www.propublica.org/article/whos-dropping-in-on-trump-budget-czar-mick-mulvaney
