Trump adviser: White House relationship with tech better than appears

A top adviser to President Trump says that despite appearances, technology firms are actually interacting with the administration more than they let on.

Reed Cordish, who advises Trump on tech policy, said on Monday that even though the administration has decreased its “photo opportunity ‘council meetings,’” with top firms, businesses are still talking one-on-one meetings to advise the president on specific policy issues.

“Businesses have not stopped engaging,” Cordish explained during the Internet Association Virtuous Circle event in San Francisco, according to reports. “What we moved away from was the political nature of public involvement and kind of photo opportunity ‘council meetings.’”

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Trump’s controversial moves, such as dropping out of the Paris climate agreement and instituting a travel ban on foreign nationals from certain predominately Muslim countries, as well as his defense of white nationalist groups following their rally in Charlottesville, Va., which turned violent this past summer, spurred criticism from CEOs at top tech firms like Apple, Google and Microsoft.

Many leaders have been hesitant to criticize Trump’s decisions directly, instead focusing on his policies. The president of the Information Technology Industry Council told Recode following Charlottesville that Silicon Valley executives were becoming “less comfortable standing next to the president as if to support all of his thinking.”

According to Cordish, though, this hasn’t kept them from working with the president in less visible ways.

“What it’s moved to is one-on-one conversations. In-depth conversations,” Cordish said. “[These conversations have] the same and even more ability to truly affect policy.”