The White House is distancing itself from Robert Creamer, one of two Democratic political operatives who abruptly stopped working to elect Hillary Clinton earlier this week after a surreptitiously recorded video appeared to implicate him in voter fraud and supporting violence at Donald Trump’s rallies.
Over the last several days, media reports surfaced that Creamer had visited the White House more than 300 times during President Obama’s tenure and may have met personally with him dozens of times. White House deputy press secretary Eric Schultz Thursday tried to clarify to reporters that Creamer wasn’t there to meet one-on-one with Obama, although he left open the idea that they might have been in the room together.
White House visitor logs, which Obama has made public on a regular basis, “don’t always reveal real-time information,” Schultz said, noting that a person might have been cleared to enter the White House but did not actually do so.
“I don’t know if we’ve had the time to go back and look at every individual visit,” he said. A lot of visits for which Creamer was cleared to attend were large events, for “more than 1,000 people,” he said.
“This idea that there were intimate meetings in the Oval Office — I don’t think is consistent with where the data is,” he said. “But if we have more information about the visits, we’ll let you know.”
On Wednesday White House press secretary Josh Earnest said he wasn’t sure he could describe Obama’s relationship with Creamer because, “I’m not sure there is much of one.”
He then said he would provide reporters with more information about Creamer’s visits and his relationship, if one existed, with the president.
Creamer, the husband of Illinois Democratic Rep. Jan Schakowsky, said Tuesday he is “stepping back” from helping Hillary Clinton‘s campaign. He made that decision after conservative activist James O’Keefe, the founder of Project Veritas, released a video showing Creamer and another Democratic activist purportedly talking about ways to incite violence at Trump campaign rallies.
When asked Wednesday why Creamer had visited the White House so many times over the course of Obama’s tenure, spokesman Josh Earnest deflected.
“I’ve been asked about the videos that have come from this outlet in the past and each time I’ve tried to urge people to take those reports not at face value and not just with a grain of salt, but with a whole package of salt,” Earnest said, adding that the videos do not usually reflect the “truth.”
