Baker to disclose all out-of-state travel
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Downplaying the appearance that he and his staff sought to hide his participation in a secretive summit of conservative leaders in Georgia earlier this month, Gov. Charlie Baker on Thursday said he did not engage in reported discussions about how to stop the rise of Donald Trump.
Baker traveled to Sea Island, a posh resort off the coast of Georgia, on the first weekend in March for the World Forum, a conference hosted by the Washington-based think tank American Enterprise Institute.
The gathering featured interviews and discussions with conservative political and thought leaders such as House Speaker Paul Ryan, political strategist Karl Rove and commentator Bill Kristol, as well as business leaders like Apple's Tim Cook. President Barack Obama's top economic advisor was also at the conference for a panel that Baker attended.
Baker, according to an agenda published by Huffington Post, took part in a panel himself on reinventing education, including approaches to vocational education, apprenticeships and prison re-entry programs.
The governor's attendance, first reported on Wednesday night by the Boston Globe, was not previously disclosed by the governor's staff.
The News Service directly asked the governor's communication team on March 4, the day the governor left for Georgia, whether Baker had plans to travel during the upcoming week, but was told that his public schedule was not ready to be released.
The Georgia trip never appeared on Baker's public schedule, but his staff did disclose the following Tuesday that Baker planned to visit Utah for a vacation with his family.
"There was no big deal on it to be honest with you, and that won't happen again. Any time I travel outside Massachusetts, we'll make sure everybody knows that I've traveled outside Massachusetts," Baker said on Thursday during his monthly "Ask the Governor" interview on Boston Public Radio.
The Huffington Post, citing Kristol and conservative pundit Pat Buchanan, reported last week that the topic of conversation among attendees of the off-the-record summit eventually turned to Trump and ideas to slow the momentum of the GOP's presidential frontrunner. Many in the Republican establishment of elected and former elected officials and their advisors have been fretting over Trump's populist ascendancy, fueling chatter about a brokered convention in July.
Despite repeatedly expressing his own reservations about Trump, Baker said he was not privy to those exchanges.
"If there were conversations going on about Donald Trump, I wasn't in them," Baker said.
The Massachusetts Democratic Party pounced on the news of Baker's trip, criticizing the governor for a "troubling pattern of secrecy."
"First, he refuses to release the resumes of his hires despite of a campaign promise to do so, then he raises hundreds of thousands in dark money for his political activities. Now, he is caught sneaking out of state to an exclusive, conservative confab using taxpayer resources," MassDems spokesman Pat Beaudry said. "Because of Gov. Baker's status quo leadership, we are already in jeopardy of losing our national No. 1 rankings. Voters deserve to know what type of ideology he brought home from his right-wing retreat."
Baker said he didn't know "we were supposed to" serve notice of his travels out of state, and said he left Massachusetts multiple times over the course of the fall to see his son play football at Union College in New York and elsewhere. Those trips also did not appear on his public schedule, though his staff had made clear that the governor planned to attend the games throughout the season when possible.
While there is no requirement that a governor inform the public of his travel schedule, Baker's predecessors, including former Gov. Deval Patrick, routinely notated on daily schedules when the governor planned to leave Massachusetts for official, political or personal reasons.
When a governor is out of state, power technically transfers to the next in the line of succession, who in this case was Lt. Gov. Karyn Polito.
Baker, in defense of the lack of disclosure, said his trip to Georgia was not a secret to everyone.
"I ran into all kinds of people in the airport that were from Massachusetts. I mean, we flew to Jacksonville. The entire plane was full of Massachusetts people going away for a week on vacation. I was high-fiving and chatting with people from one end of the plane to the other. I didn't get on a private plane, you know, I was flying coach," Baker said.
He continued, "From now on if I leave Massachusetts, we'll tell everyone."
Baker said the "most interesting conversations" that he attended while in Georgia were breakout sessions with Apple's Cook, who discussed security and privacy, and a panel that featured Obama economic advisor Jason Furman, former Obama economic advisor Larry Summers, former Bush advisor Larry Lindsay and economist Martin Feldstein on the state of the United States and global economies.
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