The Daily 202: Two cheers for Biden making White House visitor logs public again
Olivier Knox
with Mariana Alfaro
Welcome to The Daily 202 newsletter! On this day in 1877, the White House got its first telephone. The number was “1.” Then-president Rutherford B. Hayes first used it on June 29, 1877.
President Biden last week resurrected former president
In what is arguably the most problematic carve-out of the new policy,
of “purely personal guests” whose visits “do not involve any official or political business.”
In the Obama era, that included events like a secret May 2014 lunch with Hillary Clinton and a June 2015 Prince concert that brought 500 people, including several Wall Street CEOs and many prominent Democratic donors, to the White House.