September 16, 2003 or Shortly After: 9/11 Commission Executive Director Zelikow Tells Secretary Not to Log His Calls, Following Controversy over Contacts with Rove

Philip Zelikow, executive director of the 9/11 Commission, tells his secretary Karen Heitkotter not to keeps records of his calls. Although there is no formal process for logging calls, Heitkotter has been keeping records of them for Zelikow in a notebook she purchased herself. However, Commission staffers recently learned of contacts between Zelikow and White House adviser Karl Rove, leading to bad feeling on the Commission (see September 4-15, 2003 and September 15, 2003 or Shortly After). Zelikow calls Heitkotter into his office and gives her the order without explaining why. According to Heitkotter, Zelikow is “insistent,” but she is worried about doing something improper so she asks a lawyer friend on the Commission what she should do. The friend tells her to contact someone in authority, to protect herself in case the information ever becomes public. She chooses Dan Marcus, the Commission’s counsel and a Democrat, telling him Zelikow has “asked me to stop keeping records—phone logs—for his contacts with the White House.” Marcus tells her not to obey Zelikow’s instruction and to continue to log the calls, although he does not raise the matter with Zelikow, the Commission’s Chairman Tom Kean, or Vice Chairman Lee Hamilton. Marcus will later say that Zelikow’s order “looks bad—it certainly doesn’t look good.” Asked about the matter later, Zelikow will simply deny that the Commission kept formal phone logs: “I think this is recycled, garbled office gossip. I don’t think my office kept phone logs.” [Zelikow and Shenon, 2007 ; Shenon, 2008, pp. 171-172; Democracy Now!, 2/7/2008]