Politics

Visitor Logs: Presidential CEO Meeting Not the First

By Paul Blumenthal

The much-touted Presidential meeting with CEOs held earlier today was not the first time that President Obama has met with CEOs.

According to White House Visitor Logs, the President has held meetings with CEOs or business leaders at least eleven times prior to today.

These meetings do not include the countless individual meetings the President has held with CEOs, but are simply a collection of CEO Lunches and meetings with groups of CEOs.

As it was not a new thing for the President to meet with CEOs, it was also not a new thing for him to talk to the specific CEOs invited today. At least fourteen of the CEOs are listed as having met with the President or a senior adviser--Valerie Jarrett or Larry Summers--in the Visitor Logs. The others either do not show up in the logs (John Lechleiter, John Doerr) or are difficult to disambiguate (Scott Davis, Brian Roberts).

A report filed jointly by CNN and the Center for Responsive Politics showed that the CEOs collectively contributed $8.2 million to federal political campaigns over the past 20 years. Seventy percent of that went to Democrats.

Here's a database of the CEO meetings that we collected (not including the individual meetings held):

Full post as published by Sunlight Foundation on December 15, 2010 (boomark / email).