The Obama White House attempted to do damage control in a press conference Wednesday after a question was asked about Democratic operative Robert Creamer’s numerous visits to the White House.
In an exclusive interview with James O’Keefe – the filmmaker and investigative journalist behind the blockbuster videos that forced the resignation of Robert Creamer from the Hillary Clinton campaign – Breitbart News has learned that more material connecting Creamer and the White House is on the way.
When asked about Obama’s relationship with Creamer, spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters, “I’m not sure that there is much of one,” and added, “I know that they’ve met before.”
According to publicly available White House visitor logs, Creamer has visited the White House 340 times in the past seven years. During that period he has visited the POTUS himself at least 45 times, and in 2008 and 2012 “he worked with the Democratic National Committee as a consultant to the Obama Presidential Campaign coordinating field-based rapid response to Republican Presidential candidates.”
Bob Creamer is a self-described “political organizer and strategist” who is regularly referenced by Scott Foval in O’Keefe’s videos as an organizational and communications linchpin. Foval says during the videos that Creamer and his group Democracy Partners was “kind of the dark hat” to Foval’s “white hat.” Foval also refers to Creamer as “diabolical.”
As Jen Lawrence from Breitbart News reported early Wednesday, the White House is following the lead of he Democratic National Committee in trying to scurry away from Creamer despite hundreds of visits to the White House:
Creamer issued a statement after the first two videos that he was “stepping back” from his “responsibilities working with the campaign.” Interim DNC Chairman Donna Brazile tried to put distance between the DNC and Democracy Partners in a statement by saying, “the practices described in the video by this temporary regional sub-contractor do not in any way comport with our long standing policies on organizing events.”
A defiant James O’Keefe struck back at the White House, telling Breitbart News exclusively:
We got them. Seeing the White House Press Secretary stumble through his denial was embarrassing but this isn’t over. We have hours and hours of footage, including audio recordings of phone calls between Robert Creamer and the White House.
On Wednesday, Earnest told reporters that it would be “entirely inconsistent with the president’s views about political organizing” that it would be “a clever organizing tactic to incite political violence at rallies.”
However, both Creamer and Obama came up in the hard knuckles Chicago school of politics. Like Obama, Creamer is a disciple of Saul Alinsky. Creamer began his organizing career in 1970 working with Chicago’s Citizen Action Program (CAP), which had been organized by Saul Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation.
Barack Obama’s organizing work including a long stint at the Gamaliel Foundation, formed after Alinsky’s death in 1972 by the Industrial Areas Foundation and using the same “congregation-based” organizing model that focused on training and leadership development.
As a 2008 article in the New Republic titled Creation Myth: What Barack Obama won’t tell you about his community organizing past reports:
(Obama) continued to train other organizers for the Gamaliel Foundation. “It was the same traditional organizing leadership training,” recalls Obama trainee David Kindler.
At his Wednesday presser, White House spokesman Earnest said, “We should have so much confidence in the power of persuasion of our arguments that we shouldn’t have to resort to violence.”
Follow Breitbart News investigative reporter and Citizen Journalism School founder Lee Stranahan on Twitter at @Stranahan.
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