Detecting lobbying in White House visitor data

Mike Soraghan

A few weeks after I returned from an IRE and NICAR boot camp earlier this year, I got a copy of proposed changes to a rule for fracking – or hydraulic fracturing – for oil and gas on public land that was being developed by federal regulators.

Just about every change to the Bureau of Land Management fracking rule had gone the way the oil and gas industry had wanted.

After I wrote a story about that, I still had a question – what led to all the proposed changes? To figure that out, I turned to the White House Visitor Access Records.

I decided to look at who had been meeting with Heather Zichal, President Barack Obama’s top aide on energy and climate issues. In 2012, Obama tapped her to chair an interagency work group overseeing the executive branch’s work on shale gas drilling, and I knew from some of her public remarks that she’d taken on the BLM fracking rule.

The fracking rule is supposed to update regulations for oil and gas drilling on federal land by requiring drillers to disclose the chemicals they inject underground, bolstering standards to guard against well leaks and requiring that wastewater be properly managed.

Perhaps more important, it is the highest-profile federal action in response to the nation’s shale drilling boom. So it serves as a proxy for the administration’s stance on shale drilling.

Using CAR skills

I’d fiddled around with the visitor access records before. Last year, poking through the data, I’d noticed a meeting between refinery executives and Valerie Jarrett, known as the “first friend” of President Obama. That story was off my beat, and I wound up working closely with a reporter who knew refinery and air pollution issues better than I.

But this time, I had a question that had arisen from my own reporting, and I had a new set of skills from the NICAR boot camp. The boot camp got me comfortable with database programs, primarily Microsoft Access, which can handle a file of this size better than Excel. When I came back from the boot camp, I tried to do at least one query a day, even when working on non-data stories, and this project fit right in.

The visitor records are freely available for download but don’t seem to appear regularly in stories. That’s probably because they’re not the easiest to handle.

Downloading the database, provided as a comma-separated values (.csv) file, took me a couple tries. At more than 3.2 million records, it’s too big to open as a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. The White House website provides the data in chunks for easier use with spreadsheets, but it was easier for me to download the entire CSV and then import it into Microsoft Access database manager.

The quality of the data itself is pretty good. Secret Service agents seem diligent about accurately recording the names of those walking through the guard gates. The names of the staffers being visited aren’t always as precise, though, so I used wildcards, such as “*zich*”, in my Access queries to ensure I was capturing every person visiting Heather Zichal.

The data lists the time of arrival, whom the person was visiting and where the meeting was scheduled to take place. The records have separate fields for first name, last name and middle initial of each visitor. The middle initial can be very helpful in distinguishing people with common names.

Another helpful column is the “Total_people” field, which lists for each visitor the number of people in his or her group. This makes it possible to group people who came in together.

If you can pare the file down to a manageable size, you can do a lot of the analysis in Excel, filtering and sorting. But Access made it easier to work with and allowed me to filter for more data at one time while also searching with wildcards.

Comparing to OIRA records

So I’d managed to identify all the people who’d met in 2012 with Heather Zichal and Dan Utech, her colleague on energy and climate issues. But the records don’t provide visitors’ affiliations or what the meeting is about. There is a field in the records for a description of the visit. But for lobbying visits the field is usually blank.

So I still had to answer whether each visit belonged on my list of meetings about the BLM fracking rule.

I created a worksheet in Excel listing every meeting with Zichal or Utech. For each, I included the time of entry, place of entry, destination and name of each participant. Then I created a column for their titles and another for notes.

I compared them to records kept by the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. OIRA hosts meetings on proposed regulations that are a regular stop for any lobbyists. OIRA records list the regulation discussed in each meeting and the affiliations of the participants.

If someone had lobbied OIRA on the fracking rule and met with Zichal in the same time frame, I concluded they were likely meeting with her on the fracking rule.

When that didn’t give me everything I needed to know, the old-fashioned reporting began.

Backgrounding

I combed through LinkedIn pages, our internal news archive, old press releases and other sources to determine whether these folks were from the Sierra Club, Exxon Mobil or somewhere else. When that didn’t work, there was this thing called the phone, which was also helpful.

I also called just about everyone on my trimmed list, or their public affairs person. Most of these were cold calls, but a few were to people I’d talked to before. These interviews helped me figure out the topic of most of the meetings with some certainty.

I took a conservative approach. Once I realized that I was looking at whether Zichal met more with industry, I started eliminating industry meetings if there was any doubt it was about the fracking rule. I included more environmental meetings. If there was any chance it touched on the BLM proposal, I kept it in. That left about two dozen meetings on my spreadsheet.

The lopsided nature of the results surprised me. Zichal and a colleague who handles energy and climate issues met about the measure no more than four times with environmental groups. But they met more than 20 times with oil and gas industry lobbyists, executives and trade groups. Those meetings were with some of the biggest names in the business – the American Petroleum Institute, Exxon Mobil, Halliburton and others.

It was a solid story, and I know it drew interest. The White House public affairs person for environmental issues challenged a detail pretty far down in the story. Fortunately it was correct, and I didn’t hear back. And it was the “most read” on our site for several days.

Visitor record pitfalls

These visitor records can offer an important window into how the White House fits into the day-to-day realm of lobbying and policymaking.

The data can help you figure out if the people you cover have been making appearances at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. You can see who’s getting face time with the staffers who handle the issues you cover.

But there are some infuriating details to keep in mind about the data. They are not “visitor logs,” which would imply that you’re looking at fairly raw data as it was entered by front-line officers and staffers.

The White House discloses the visitor records on a voluntary basis after reviewing it and scrubbing some names. Since disclosure is voluntary, there’s no consequence for withholding records.

For example, I could find no records of meetings with Interior Deputy Secretary David Hayes, the department’s point man on the BLM fracking issue. Interior sources told me he has visited the White House numerous times to discuss the fracking rule.

The administration brags it releases the records as part of President Obama’s commitment to transparency. But Obama aides agreed to release them only under threat of a lawsuit. And another group is still pressing its case in court to mandate release of the data as a public record.

Hopefully, the more the data is used for high-quality stories, the more its importance to the public can be demonstrated.

 

Mike Soraghan (msoraghan@eenews.net) is a reporter for EnergyWire, a publication of E&E Publishing, the leading source for comprehensive, daily coverage of environmental and energy policy and markets. Before E&E, he covered congressional leadership for The Hill newspaper and was a Washington correspondent for The Denver Post.