Obama's on-air defenders also lobby White House

Donovan Slack and Paul Singer | USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — President Obama took office promising to restrict lobbyists' influence on his administration, but from its first days his team has tapped lobbyists to help shape the Obama message and repeat it on television, even as they were being paid to lobby the White House.

Since Obama took office in 2009, the White House has convened regular communications briefings with roughly two dozen Democrats who have then fanned out to deliver the administration's spin in the media.

At least four of those surrogate spokespeople were registered lobbyists who returned to the White House with paying clients seeking everything from basic introductions to top officials to tax breaks for the nation's largest financial firms, according to a USA TODAY analysis of White House visitor logs and other public records. At least two other participants in the administration's messaging operation were public relations consultants who also returned to the White House with clients.

These six people have brought a total of 31 clients to the White House for more than 55 meetings with senior officials since January 2009. In many cases, their clients got what they wanted. In all cases, they got White House access, a highly coveted commodity in Washington.

The White House declined to discuss the messaging briefings in detail, how they selected invitees or why they included lobbyists.

"Generally speaking, we value our external outreach and outward engagement — excluding outside voices from our consultations would be a narrow-minded approach to public service," said Principal Deputy Press Secretary Eric Schultz. He said the administration has followed through on the president's pledge to reduce lobbyists' influence.

Nevertheless, the mixture of White House messaging and lobbying "poses the very conflict of interest that Obama was supposed to be standing against," said Craig Holman, government affairs lobbyist for Public Citizen, a Washington-based public interest group.

"Even though it's not a financial quid pro quo going on, there is a quid pro quo of the White House getting a favor from a paid lobbyist and then the paid lobbyist actually lobbying the White House," Holman said. "If you want something for a paying client out of the White House, and then you're going to do something, do a favor for the White House, that's wearing two hats."

REDUCING THE INFLUENCE OF LOBBYISTS

Obama banned former lobbyists from serving in the White House on his first day in office, saying he wanted to make good on a campaign pledge to "close the revolving door that lets lobbyists come into government freely and lets them use their time in public service as a way to promote their own interests over the interests of the American people."

But less than two months after his inauguration, the White House invited 18 Democratic strategists — including three registered lobbyists — to a West Wing briefing with Obama messaging guru David Axelrod as the new president was trying to drum up public support for a health care overhaul.

The idea behind the meetings is that those strategists would then go on television or be interviewed by reporters and be able to explain and defend the administration's decisions. They regularly did.

In print, online and in hundreds of television appearances, they have defended everything from the president's tax proposals and annual budgets to his response to the rise of Islamic State and his executive action deferring deportation for immigrants brought to the United States illegally as children.

USA TODAY identified a total of 16 messaging meetings at the White House so far, the most recent in February. The White House also has convened much more frequent telephone conferences — known as "talker calls" — with more or less the same group of people, according to participants.

The meetings have at times included White House policy specialists and senior staff such as the chair of the Council of Economic Advisers. And "once or twice the president came by just very briefly to shake hands and left," said Martin Frost, a former congressman turned lobbyist and regular participant in the meetings who also brought back clients to lobby the White House.

"They give their take on what they're doing and what they want," said frequent participant Steve Elmendorf, a former chief of staff to ex-House majority leader Dick Gephardt and deputy campaign manager for John Kerry's presidential bid in 2004. The meetings are "also an opportunity for people outside to give feedback to the White House on how to shape their message, what points are not going over well."

MULTIPLE HATS

Elmendorf has been a registered lobbyist for more than a decade. He has been a regular attendee of Obama's messaging meetings and has brought 18 clients back to the White House for nearly two dozen meetings since 2009.

Among them were executives from General Electric and the American Wind Energy Association, who both were seeking extensions of expiring tax breaks worth billions of dollars in 2012. That year, those two clients paid Elmendorf's firm $560,000 for lobbying. In the last-minute scramble to avoid the combination of tax increases and spending cuts known as the "fiscal cliff," Congress and the White House settled on a deal that granted what Elmendorf's clients were pushing.

Elmendorf says his role as a defender of the administration has nothing to do with his lobbying.

"Whether I was a talker or not, I would be taking people to the White House because they have legitimate interests that people in the White House want to hear about, whether they agree with them or disagree with them."

Frost attended nearly a dozen messaging meetings at the White House and returned with three clients to six meetings with senior officials since 2011. He brought colleagues representing a Kansas group trying to get a federal commitment to build a new $1 billion homeland security biological research facility at Kansas State University to meet with White House budget officials. The group paid Frost's firm $500,000 for lobbying between 2012 and 2014 and broke ground on the new facility in May.

Frost said his messaging and lobbying roles were completely separate, most of his lobbying was on Capitol Hill, and he wasn't the lead lobbyist on the Kansas account. In addition, he said the White House officials at communications strategy meetings were different from those he brought his clients to meet.

"Any meetings I took part in at the White House for clients (which were infrequent) were with technical staff," Frost said in an email.

But even those "technical staff" may have been aware that Frost and the other lobbyists were acting as Obama surrogates in the media.

"Those people watch TV, too," said David Goodfriend, a former aide in the Clinton White House who is now a lobbyist and a participant in the messaging meetings. "Those people know that I am a friend of the White House and so there has to be some acknowledgement of the fact that I was out there as a Democrat on TV, and the fact that I defended the administration on TV surely must have helped me get a meeting at the White House. How could it not?"

'A FRIEND OF THE WHITE HOUSE'

Goodfriend has attended a dozen messaging meetings at the White House since 2009 and returned during the same period with four clients to 15 meetings with senior White House officials. They included DISH Network, which wanted to secure rights from federal authorities to use more airwave frequencies for wireless transmissions.

DISH, which has paid Goodfriend roughly $240,000 per year since 2009 for lobbying, got some key items it was lobbying for. The president signed a satellite-television law, and the White House included wireless frequency auctions in a jobs bill the president signed in 2012.

Goodfriend said there was no "quid pro quo" with the White House for his role as a messenger and defender of the administration on television. "I didn't ask for anything in exchange. I just asked for a meeting. I got the meeting," he said. "And I had to have the goods, I had to have the substantive policy and political reasons or else there was no deal."

The fourth Obama messenger to bring lobbying clients back to the White House was Penny Lee, a former senior political and communications adviser for Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev.

Lee was the leader in 2011 of an alliance of for-profit colleges seeking to water down a draft Education Department rule that would deny the schools billions of dollars in federal financial aid unless they could prove their students were getting meaningful post-graduation employment. The coalition paid Lee $500,000 that year, and she escorted top executives from the group to a key White House meeting a few weeks before the new rule was released — with the weaker language her clients were seeking.

Lee also brought to the White House a group of Alaskan tribal corporation executives who were pushing for authorization of more oil drilling in Alaska in 2010. Obama later ordered the Department of the Interior to expand drilling in the region, much to the dismay of environmental groups.

Lee said she did not think the clients she brought to the White House received special consideration because she defended the administration on television. "There's never been any inference or implication that receiving talking points will result in consideration of a client's position on other issues other than on the merits," she said.

LOBBYING VS. SPIN

The two public relations consultants who brought clients back to the White House were Brendan Daly, a former communications director for Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Hilary Rosen, managing director of the firm SKDKnickerbocker.

Because they are communications consultants, they are not required to register as lobbyists or disclose who their clients are and what they want. But news reports and other records show Daly took one of his firm's clients to a meeting at the White House, while Rosen met with White House officials with a variety of PR clients from oil giant BP to gay rights advocates.

Daly said that what his firm's client, the National Retail Federation, was seeking — a narrower, more flexible set of required benefits under the Affordable Care Act — was in line with what the administration already wanted. "That was the only meeting I ever set up," Daly said, adding that he wasn't a lobbyist. "That wasn't really my role. My role was dealing with the communications aspect of it."

Rosen said her client meetings were initiated by the White House, not by her. "If the White House invites you to provide your insight and advice on messaging, especially on issues of common interest like gay marriage ... of course you participate. Why wouldn't we?" Rosen said.

There is no way to tie any specific meeting to any one policy decision. Schultz, the White House spokesman, said policy decisions are "exclusively made on the merits, and typically involve an extensive interagency review process that can sometimes take months or years."

And he ticked off a litany of instances when Obama has sought to decrease the influence of lobbyists on the administration. "President Obama has done more in the past six years to close the revolving door of special interests than any president before him," Schultz said.

USA TODAY could only track these meetings, Schultz said, because the Obama White House is the first to make its visitor logs public.

The Obama White House did not invent messaging meetings.

"We called them influencer calls," said Dan Bartlett, White House communications director for Republican then-president George W. Bush. "We had a pretty systematic outreach mechanism."

Hillary Clinton's campaign has started to hold similar calls.

The challenge for any White House, Bartlett said, is that in Washington, "prominent figures like that are certainly wearing multiple hats."

Obama's election came on the heels of several lobbying scandals, including the conviction of Jack Abramoff, who lavished gifts on public officials in pursuit of policy changes for his clients. The Bush administration also had come under fire in 2008 for holding communications briefings with retired generals who then defended the Pentagon and the Iraq War on television and were simultaneously profiting from ties to the defense industry, including as lobbyists.

At the time, then-senator Obama's presidential campaign issued a statement saying he was "deeply disturbed by this latest evidence that the Bush Administration has sought to manipulate the public's trust."

One regular attendee of the Obama messaging meetings who didn't bring back clients said he thought it would cross an ethical line. "I think you've got to be careful when you're doing that," said Peter Fenn, who owns his own public relations and communications company. "You have two roles, you have to say, look, 'I'm a surrogate' or 'I'm somebody who's going to help you guys out,' but you know, you leave that other stuff at the door."