Donald Trump Met Secretly With Interest Groups

 

Donald J. Trump’s private meeting in Washington on Thursday featured nearly a dozen industry leaders, including a veteran lobbyist and the chief executive of a major airline trade organization, attendees confirmed.

Mr. Trump’s meeting, like others he held that day, was at the hotel he is building in the gutted body of the Old Post Office, and was kept secret, with attendees invited by phone.

Nicholas E. Calio, a former lobbyist who worked on legislative affairs for President George Bush, was in attendance. Mr. Calio is now the president and chief executive of Airlines for America, a large trade group. There was also Juanita Duggan, the president and chief executive of the National Federation of Independent Business, another major trade group. She is a former aide who served in the first Bush and Reagan administrations, and she was once an official with the tobacco giant Philip Morris Companies.

An aide to Ms. Duggan confirmed her attendance, but said that she was respecting a request not to discuss what took place. Penny Kozakos, an aide to Mr. Calio, said in an email that “Mr. Calio regularly meets with leaders of industry, members of Congress, other elected officials, including those seeking office, about the airline industry and its importance to the economy and jobs.”

Yet Mr. Trump routinely makes “special interests” and lobbyists a focus of derision in his stump speeches, making the meeting something of a surprise.

Hope Hicks, a spokeswoman for Mr. Trump, said that the candidate’s adviser, Senator Jeff Sessions, had arranged a meeting with people for whom he has “great respect.”

“Mr. Trump didn’t know them, but it was a brief meeting that took place right after the lengthy foreign policy team meeting,” Ms. Hicks said in an email.

In a town-hall-style forum hosted by Greta Van Susteren of Fox News on Sunday night, Mr. Trump was asked about a potential merger of airlines, asking what his antitrust division might look like as president. 

Reported by NY Daily Times

“I’d look at it very carefully,” Mr. Trump said. “I’d look at a lot of that. You know, and that might be not the Republican thing to say. But if we don’t have competition and keep some competition, we’re going to have a lot of problems in the country.”

He added: “And I see mergers of different things. I won’t say it because what do I need certain industries against me for? But the fact is that you’ve got to have competition to be great. And when you see these big fat mergers and the companies get bigger, they get bloated and they don’t do well.”