Tuesday, 29 Oct 2013 08:29 AM
By Andrea Billups
Toni Townes-Whitley, a college classmate of Michelle Obama and a senior executive at besieged Obamcare website contractor CGI Federal, has visited the White House several times for both personal and professional reasons.
Townes-Whitley visited the White House complex on four occasions earlier this year to meet with administration officials in her role as vice president for at CGI Federal, which secured a $678 million no-bid contract to build the Obamacare exchange web portal.
Townes-Whitley, a Princeton University classmate of first lady Michelle Obama, and her husband, John Whitley, who works as an engineer for CBS News, also attended a White House Christmas gathering together in 2010, posing for photos with the president and first lady.
The records from the White House visitors log show the CGI Federal vice president, who graduated Princeton in 1985, the same year as Michelle Obama, had a deeper connection with federal business than simply a college connection to the first lady.
Three of the afternoon meetings, held in the Old Executive Office Building, were scheduled in advance, and one, Friday April 26, was not. Three of the meetings were held on Friday and one on Saturday.
The records show Townes-Whitley was alone in her visits.
The first meeting was held on Jan. 18. Townes-Whitley met with Danny Werfel, a principal deputy commissioner on the Affordable Care Act, who was named acting director of the IRS in May. Records for that day show Townes-Whitley arrived at the White House at 1:31 p.m. and left at 3:23 p.m.
Townes-Whitley visited again April 26, arriving at 3:43 p.m. and leaving at 4:27 p.m. She met with Jonathan McBride, who was at the time special assistant to the president and deputy director of the presidential personnel office. McBride was promoted in July to director of the presidential personnel office.
Townes-Whitley met again with McBride on June 1, a Saturday, for about five hours, leaving the White House at around 7 p.m.
On Friday, June 28, Townes-Whitley met with John McNaught, an economics staff assistant.
The White House logs do not indicate the reason for the visits.
Townes-Whitley joined CGI in May in 2010, less than two months after President Barack Obama signed the Affordable Care Act. She serves as the lead of the company's Civilian Agency Programs Business Unit for the Federal Group, according to a bio published on the CGI website. The unit serves 22 federal civilian agencies in the U.S. and 34 other countries.
A CGI executive testified before an angry congressional committee last week about the website's significant technical problems, which have caused a registration delay for consumers seeking health insurance from federal exchanges. The White House has promised that the site will be fully functional by the end of November, although members of Congress are seeking a pause in the registration deadline until repairs are complete.
Prior to her work at CGI, Townes-Whitley worked at Unisys Corp., as a vice president for global public sector, system integration and consulting. She is also a former Peace Corps volunteer in central Africa, serving for three years, from 1986-1989.
According to Federal Election Commission Records, Toni Townes-Whitley gave $500 in 2011 and 2012 to Obama's reelection, and another $1,000 to the Obama Victory Fund.
A story published by the Daily Caller on Monday said that while at Princeton, Michelle Obama and Townes-Whitley were both active in two Princeton University groups – the Organization of Black Unity and the Third World Center. They both now belong to the Association of Black Princeton Alumni.
Michelle Obama served on the governing board of the Third World Center and was active in the Organization of Black Unity, according to 2008 Boston Globe article.
"Although Obama had friends who were both black and white, her social world revolved around several of the black organizations on campus, as it did for many other black students,” the Globe reported. “Obama was a member of the Organization of Black Unity, a primary resource for black students on campus which arranged speakers and programs."
Source
.
.
Related
Top Exec at ObamaCare Website Co. was in Radical Black Groups with Michelle Obama
October 26, 2013 By Daniel Greenfield
I don’t know if this is a smoking gun necessarily since we have yet to establish whether they kept in contact after Princeton, but it does add a troubling dimension to the question of why a company with a bad track record suddenly began receiving huge contracts from Obama Inc.
Including a huge no bid contract for the ObamaCare Healthcare.gov website.
First Lady Michelle Obama’s Princeton classmate is a top executive at the company that earned the contract to build the failed Obamacare website.
Toni Townes-Whitley, Princeton class of ’85, is senior vice president at CGI Federal, which earned the no-bid contract to build the $678 million Obamacare enrollment website at Healthcare.gov. CGI Federal is the U.S. arm of a Canadian company.
Obama and Townes-Whitley both worked with the Third World Center and with the “Organization of Black Unity”.
Third World Center didn’t just refer to the Third World, as you might assume, but to radical minority activists in the United States who began referring to themselves that way. Princeton has since changed the name as an outdated relic of radicalism.
Michelle Obama’s radical activism at Princeton has been discussed in detail before.
Princeton, 1984.
Michelle Obama attends and promotes a “Black Solidarity” event for guest lecturer Manning Marable, who was, according to Cornel West, probably “the best known black Marxist in the country.” The event is the work of the Third World Center (TWC), a campus group whose board membership is exclusively reserved for minorities.
Michelle Obama was a board member at the Third World Center which means that it’s quite likely she knew Townes-Whitley. Townes-Whitley joined CGI Federal under Obama and some press releases make it clear that Townes-Whitley was involved in government contracts.
CGI Federal (NYSE: GIB) has won a position on a $900 million blanket purchase agreement with the U.S. Agency for International Development for information technology support.
The Fairfax, Va.-based IT and business process contractor said the potential five-year IT Forward BPA supports the agency’s IT reform efforts.
CGI has worked with the agency for more than a decade, said Toni Townes-Whitley, a senior vice president.
That’s a pretty huge contract, again for a company with a poor track record. And here’s an even bigger one.
The U.S. Department of Interior (DOI)/ Interior Business Center (IBC), Acquisition Services Directorate (AQD) has awarded CGI Federal Inc. (CGI), a wholly-owned U.S. operating subsidiary of CGI Group Inc. (NYSE:GIB)(TSX:GIB.A), a prime position on the indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity (ID/IQ), multiple-award contract for Foundation Cloud Hosting Services. The ID/IQ, which supports the DOI Office of the Chief Information Officer (CIO), as well as other government customers including both civilian agencies and the Department of Defense has a total contract ceiling value of US $1 billion over nine years
CGI, the first large company Cloud Service Provider to receive FedRAMP provisional authorization to operate for a government specific community cloud, will support DOI-wide cloud hosting, data center consolidation and IT infrastructure tasks. CGI will deliver a range of services for storage, secure file transfers, virtual machines, database and web hosting, as well as development and test environment hosting.
“As a Federal cloud leader, CGI brings experience and innovation to the delivery of cloud-based services through this contract, enabling DOI and its bureaus to more effectively support their broad and important missions,” said Toni Townes-Whitley, Senior Vice-President for Civilian Agency programs at CGI.
It certainly seemed like Toni Townes-Whitley was front and center every time CGI Federal received strangely huge contracts from Obama Inc.
Source
.
No comments:
Post a Comment