Is There Evidence Cutter And Shulman Met After Cutter Joined Obama's Re-election Campaign?

I've been seeing the charge that Obama's Deputy Campaign Manager Stephanie Cutter attended Obamacare implementation meetings being made on some sites, and I think it's important to be accurate about it.

From Wikipedia:

She served as the Chief Spokesperson for the Obama-Biden Transition Project. She served in the Treasury Department as Timothy Geithner's counselor where "she protected Geithner’s fragile reputation and tried to spin unpopular policies like the Troubled Asset Relief Program and the A.I.G. bailout."

...

In 2010, Cutter was named Assistant to the President for Special Projects, charged with managing communications and outreach strategy for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. In 2011, Cutter was named Deputy Senior Advisor to President Barack Obama.

This Jake Tapper article makes it seem like her "special project" role was a lot like running PR for Obamacare. It was only in September of 2011 that she left her post as Senior Advisor to work on Obama's re-election campaign. Any meetings with Shulman before that can be fairly well explained (the frequency of Shulman's meetings is another issue entirely, however). Meetings after her move to the campaign, and pretty serious questions can be raised.

According to White House visitor logs, Cutter and Shulman were at the White House at the same time only once after September 2011: June 5, 2012.

Cutter's day:
14:30 - Meeting with FLOTUS in the residence. Total attending: 4
18:30 - Meeting with David Plouffe in the West Wing. Total attending: 1

Shulman's day:
16:00 - South Lawn event with POTUS (Shulman's wife joined him). Total attending: 3,692. That event appears to be this one.

Now, Cutter is unquestionably a partisan hack, but her presence at meetings before she left to join Obama's reelection campaign is not a smoking gun or even very strange. The whole purpose of this "gotcha" was to directly link Obama's reelection campaign with IRS meetings, and that does not appear to have happened with Cutter assuming the logs are accurate. Is it possible she learned something before she left? I suppose, but again, there's no evidence of that.

There's plenty about this IRS story to be outraged about. Let's not go inventing anything that could be easily refuted and allow Team Obama to spin this all away as some Republican witch hunt.

posted by JohnE. at 03:36 PM

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