Axelrod: Obama 'furious' over DNC invite

by Mark Silva and Christi Parsons

As the Obama administration begins an unprecedented publication of lists of people who have visited the White House on its Web-site -- yes, philanthropist George Soros has dropped in -- a senior adviser says President Barack Obama was "furious" ito learn that the Democratic Party had offered big donors a chance to meet with senior policy makers.

"There was one offering, or one brochure, or one communication from the Democratic National Committee, in the beginning of the year, and they had a line in there about access to senior policy makers,'' senior adviser David Axelrod says in an interview that National Public Radio's Weekend Edition is airing Saturday morning. "No one was more furious about that, when he learned about that, than the president himself. And he learned about it from a press clipping."

As the new owners of the Chicago Cubs are settling in, Axelrod, whose boss is a bigtime White Sox fan, also is asked what it will take for the Cubs to improve their game.

"You know we've explored this, and we don't know that we can do that by Executive Order,'' the Chicagoan says. "It would probably take an act of Congress and there is a real conflict on the Hill about whether to help the Cubs."

The White House, claiming "a major milestone in government transparency,'' says today that it has processed "110 disclosure requests from September that yielded nearly 500 visitor records. All of these are now available on the White House website in accessible, searchable format for anyone to browse or download. Consistent with our earlier announcement that we will only release records 90 days or older, this first batch covers the period of time between January 20, 2009 to July 31, 2009. Future batches will be posted on an ongoing basis.''

See our account of the first list-dump on a Friday afternoon here:

By Christi Parsons

President Obama today released a list of people who have visited his White House recently, and some of the most controversial names of his political history are among them.

There's just one catch. Jeremiah Wright did drop by, but it wasn't that Jeremiah Wright - just one of the 100,000 reported visitors who happened to have the same name as the president's controversial former pastor.

Same for William Ayers, a White House guest who was, according to the administration, not the former radical and Chicago based education professor who caused some trouble for his friend and neighbor during the campaign.

That's the cautionary tale that accompanies the first release of the White House visitors' logs - at least as one of the president's lawyers presents it.

There's an "important lesson here," says Norm Eisen, Obama's special counsel for ethics and government reform. "This unprecedented level of transparency can sometimes be confusing rather than providing clear information."

The names came to light in a late-afternoon information drop from the White House, in keeping with a policy that it announced over the summer to begin making the logs public.

Initially, the Obama team followed the Bush administration practice of keeping the visitor lists secret. After the open-government group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington filed suit, however, Obama decided the records should be public.

By the end of this year, the White House will begin publishing complete logs of visitors who have visited since Sept. 15 for any interested party to peruse. Records of visits prior to that date will be available, too, but only in response to requests for specific names.

"There are heightened privacy concerns in this era," said Anne Weismann, chief counsel for CREW. "That said, we're talking about what's going on in the White House, the people's house, and this information can be important."

The document release today - the first of its kind under the new policy - includes the names of 110 positive matches from specific requests submitted so far.

They show that union leaders have spent considerable time within the compound. National Organization for Women President Kim Gandy has visited several times. Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, former Federal Resre Chairman Alan Greenspan and philanthropist George Soros are frequent visitors, too.

Most of the results aren't surprising. News of visits by Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas and Afghan President Hamed Karzai, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, actors Hill Harper and George Clooney and tennis phenoms Serena and Venus Williams wasn't exactly a news flash.

But what of Michael Jordan, R. Kelly and Michael Moore, whose names also showed up in the list?

Nevermind, Eisen writes in a blog post on the White House Website. Not who you think they are.

"The well-known individuals with those names never actually came to the White House," he says. "Nevertheless, we were asked for those names and so we have included records for those individuals who were here and share the same names."