White House Secret Media Meeting 5x Longer than McChrystal’s
NEW YORK: Fox News reported Oct 21 on The O’Reilly Factor that on Monday Oct 19 Obama spent 2-1/2 hours in a secret meeting with David Axelrod, Rahm Emanuel, Robert Gibbs, 3 columnists from the New York Times, 2 commentators from MSNBC, “as well as a variety of other committed left wingers.” Presumably they were working on White House media strategy.
On October 2nd CBS News reported that Obama spared a whole 25 minutes to speak to his Afghan field commander General Stanley A. McChrystal. This only after The Washington Times, Michelle Malkin, SisterToldJah.com, and the rest of the media reported September 28th that Obama had met with the general only once in 70 days.
At the time of this post only truthfreedomprosperity.com seems to notice. When the NIP heard this report we wondered how it is that the President could spend 5 times more time planning his media strategy than planning his strategy in Afghanistan. We wonder how this looks to world leaders, not to mention our military. Is Obama’s preoccupation with the media a modern day equivalent to fiddling while Rome burns?
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I resent the insinuations in your article. Our new president is time efficient and really knows how to get things done.
Obama manages his time by having special interest groups and lobbyists like the Apollo Alliance and SEIU writing bills and making decisions for him. Apparently his staff just hasn’t found a lobbyist to run the war for him. Be patient, it is just a matter of time…
Is this meeting subject to a FOIA request? Can an organization or individual request the minutes to this meeting since it occured at the White House?
@stephanie We saw the meeting widely reported, and when you see who attended it is easy to surmise that it was about media control and strategy. One could be sure they weren’t talking about Afghanistan. But we don’t really know.
We’ll have one of our lawyers look into whether this falls under FOIA. My guess is though that the WH rightfully has some ability to keep their meetings private, but I do not know the context of their privacy rights. The gory details of this meeting would be most interesting.
Stephanie presents an interesting question. As a general rule the White House is subject to the FOIA. But a large exemption exists for the Presidents immediate personal staff and those whose sole function is to advise and assist the President. It would seem though that the presence of the New York Times and MSNBC columnists destroys this privilege.
http://www.usdoj.gov/oip/foia_updates/Vol_XIV_3/page4.htm