Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney brushed off the leak of schedules showing President Donald Trump has spent more than half his days in unstructured “executive time” as not “that valuable.”
“That’s probably the closest thing to a public schedule that we put out,” Mulvaney told NBC’s Chuck Todd on “Meet the Press” of the leak, the second showing Trump’s workday with large, unstructured gaps.
“So it wasn’t that valuable of information,” he declared.
Despite his attempt to downplay the disclosure, Mulvaney reportedly signed off on an investigation to track down the leaker.
He also claimed the president’s vague schedule doesn’t reflect Trump’s actual work.
“That executive time is on there to allow the president to prep for the next meeting, to debrief from the previous meeting,” Mulvaney said. “The phone calls start at 6:30 in the morning and they go until 11 o’clock at night, so I can assure you that the gentleman is working more than what’s on that calendar.”
The first round of leaked schedules were published in an Axios scoop last week, showing “executive time” accounted for 60 percent of Trump’s schedule from November 2018 to February 2019. The outlet reported Trump used that time for such pursuits as newspaper reading, TV watching and phone calls.
A second leak of schedules over the weekend shows Trump still spending more than half his days in “executive time.”