Congressional meetings involving the Ambassador

Rachad,

We had a good staff meeting yesterday and believe we’ve established a process to address our immediate policy issues. Mouad attended the meeting and I’m sure he will give you his own readout. Based upon this morning’s meeting and our discussion on Tuesday I’d like to suggest the following processes for your consideration:

1. Secure time available to the Ambassador. This would be handled by your staff and they would inform us of your availability.

2. Prioritizing upcoming congressional meetings and selecting members to meet with. Our staffs would jointly collaborate, and recommend directly to you through your staff, regarding the order of the meetings. I am always available to directly provide you with any additional thinking in this regard.

3. Prepare a briefing document for your meeting. This will include talking points and issues of importance to the member, and proposed asks and expected results from the meeting. The briefing paper would be developed by our joint staffs at our weekly staff meeting and will involve our congressional, communications and policy people. The final paper would come up to you from both your staff and me. As we do more and more meetings, the briefing document process will become more streamlined with only some smaller “tweaks” for future meetings depending on the member and purpose of meeting.

4. We also think a face to face preparation meeting with you before important congressional visits would be useful. We understand however that this may cause undue pressure on your schedule.

5. It is also my understanding from our meetings that MAC staff will attend congressional meetings with you when you ask us to, when your staff is unable, or when we add some value to the meeting as a result of our familiarity with the member. In all cases, we think a summary of the meeting is important as it will provide us with important information on the nuances of the meeting, and an understanding of where a member stands on various issues. I believe that such reporting is critical and has been extremely helpful in the past, as we have been able to rate the history of each congressional member over time based upon specific actions they took with regard to Morocco.

6. The congressional staff visits continue extremely well with joint cooperation between our staffs. We are proud that our staffs have jointly conducted nearly 100 meetings to date. Congratulations to your and our staffs.

Based upon the plan you approved during our meeting on Tuesday, I suggest that your staff (Saida?) participate in our weekly communications meeting (she already does each Thursday) and through that meeting we will jointly implement tasks approved in the plan as a regular part of our business together.

Based upon your approval of our plan two weeks ago, we would conduct a weekly meeting, including our staffs, to oversee the implementation of tasks for the plan. 

I look forward to your review and comment and am pleased by the cooperation together. I feel we are making good progress, and as I mentioned to you, as we get used to a new way of doing business together please let me know if I ever do anything you do not feel comfortable with. 

Thank you, Ed

Edward M. Gabriel

President

The Gabriel Company, LLC

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Email: ed.gabriel@thegabrielco.com

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