The White House is hosting a private meeting this week to promote commerce with Cuba that was organized by an outside business group, and is so far being kept off of public schedules.
A White House official acknowledged that the gathering would take place Wednesday but did not respond to Washington Examiner questions about why it was not included on any public White House schedule, exactly who the participants are, and why an outside business group helped organize it, according to sources familiar with the event.
“As part of the ongoing engagement with the business community about the president’s efforts to normalize relations with Cuba, on Wednesday May 25, the White House will host a meeting of small- and medium-sized business leaders from around the country for a briefing on the administration’s Cuba policy,” the official told the Examiner.
“The event will include an update on the administration’s polices and priorities regarding Cuba, a discussion on the various business opportunities in Cuba and best practices from companies who have been operating there,” the official said.
The meeting also wasn’t mentioned anywhere on the website of Business Forward, a nonprofit group with close ties to the White House that helped organize the gathering, according to sources familiar with the meeting.
A spokeswoman for Business Forward said Monday that the group hadn’t publicly distributed any information about the meeting because “we’re still finalizing some of the details.”
“We’re planning to soon,” she said, noting that the briefing is one of “many similar programs we regularly hold” at the White House.
“We organized this meeting based on interest from business leaders who have wanted to learn more about the U.S. relationship with Cuba and how it would affect their businesses,” she wrote in an email response.
Business Forward is a group that charges major companies such as AT&T, Hilton Worldwide, Microsoft, Visa and WalMart, among others, $50,000 in annual membership fees for special access to Obama administration officials, according to a report in Politico.
The organization doesn’t consider the access it provides as lobbying, according to Jim Doyle, a veteran Democratic operative and founder of Business Forward. Doyle says the bulk of its work is organizing “briefings.”
“Our goal is to focus on all of those people outside Washington who have something to say, just don’t have a means of getting involved,” he told Politico.
The White House Cuba event, to take place at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building Wednesday, will feature remarks from senior officials from several executive agencies, including the acting director of the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, which administers and enforces U.S. economic and trade sanctions, sources said.
Attendees will include officials from U.S. companies, as well as lawyers, lobbyists and other activists involved in President Obama’s effort to normalize relations with Cuba.
James Williams, the president of Engage Cuba, a coalition of private companies and organizations working to end the travel and trade embargo on Cuba, is the only person from the private sector scheduled to speak, these sources said. Williams did not respond to an emailed inquiry from the Examiner about his speaking role.
On Engage Cuba’s website, Williams takes credit for leading an “under-the-radar $3 million national campaign to successfully convince the Obama administration to reform U.S. Cuba relations.”
Most of that work was done in the lead-up to Obama’s historic December 14 announcement that the two countries had agreed to begin to normalize diplomatic relations, according to an article in Mother Jones titled “Inside the Crazy-Back Channel Negotiations That Revolutionized Our Relationship with Cuba.”
Williams has never registered to lobby on Cuba issues and has not responded to several Examiner inquiries asking for an explanation. At the time of the advocacy campaign, Williams was director of public policy at the Denver-based Trimpa group, a government relations firm.
The Trimpa group posted the Mother Jones article giving the firm, and Williams specifically, credit for the “lobbying” campaign on its website.
Trimpa, according to the Mother Jones article, also hired Luis Miranda, who had recently left his position as White House director of Hispanic media, and sought the blessing of Jim Messina, Obama’s then-deputy chief of staff, to launch a public campaign promoting a change in Cuban policy.
Miranda, now the communications director of the Democratic National Committee, told the Examiner over the weekend that he didn’t do any work for the Cuba campaign that required registering as a lobbyist. He did not respond to follow-up questions about how much contact he had with the administration or Congress.
After Obama announced the rapprochement with Cuba, Williams left Trimpa to create Engage Cuba, and the group hired Fierce Government Relations to lobby Congress and the administration to lift the trade embargo. The Engage Cuba group pays Fierce Government Relations $70,000 a quarter for their lobbying work, according to lobbying disclosure records the Examiner reviewed.
Meredith McGehee, policy director of the Campaign Legal Center, said Williams and others who worked on the $3 million Cuba campaign would be required to register as lobbyists only if they made two or more contacts with Capitol Hill or the executive branch.
If either limited their time on the Cuba campaign to less than 20 percent of their overall work-time, then they also could avoid registering to the lobby.
Many times, McGehee said, big advocacy campaigns use other groups to be the public spokespersons. Such a scenario allows them to stay under the radar under current law.
“This is just one example of why the current Lobbying Disclosure Act needs to be strengthened,” she said.
On Obama’s first full day in office, he tried to fulfill a major campaign promise to stop the lobbying revolving door by signing an executive order to bar White House staff and other appointees from lobbying their former administration colleagues for two years after leaving office. But current laws define the term lobbying so narrowly that several loopholes exist that allow several members of the Obama administration to represent the very industries they previously oversaw.
