In order to bypass lobbyist rules and in contradiction to Barack Obama’s public rhetoric, the White House has been meeting with prominent lobbyists off-property in places such as the coffee shop across the street. The New York Times:

WASHINGTON — There are no Secret Service agents posted next to the barista and no presidential seal on the ceiling, but the Caribou Coffee across the street from the White House has become a favorite meeting spot to conduct Obama administration business.

Here at the Caribou on Pennsylvania Avenue, and a few other nearby coffee shops, White House officials have met hundreds of times over the last 18 months with prominent K Street lobbyists — members of the same industry that President Obama has derided for what he calls its “outsized influence” in the capital.

Obama? A shameless hypocrite? Well, now my world is turned upside down.

On the agenda over espressos and lattes, according to more than a dozen lobbyists and political operatives who have taken part in the sessions, have been front-burner issues like Wall Street regulation, health care rules, federal stimulus money, energy policy and climate control — and their impact on the lobbyists’ corporate clients.

But because the discussions are not taking place at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, they are not subject to disclosure on the visitors’ log that the White House releases as part of its pledge to be the “most transparent presidential administration in history.”

More blatant hypocrisy and even outright lies from the Obama Administration? I’m having heart palpitations over here.

White House officials said there was nothing improper about the off-site meetings.

“The Obama administration has taken unprecedented steps to increase the openness and transparency of the White House,” said Dan Pfeiffer, director of communications. “We expect that all White House employees adhere to their obligations under our very stringent ethics rules regardless of who they are meeting with or where they meet.”

Nice spin, but as the New York Times notes, these off-property meetings aren’t subject to the disclosure rules the White House touts. Jim Messina (deputy chief of staff) could meet with the top lobbyist for Goldman Sachs, and because the meeting didn’t occur at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave but instead at the coffee shop across the street, we wouldn’t know.

And such a scenario is hardly a far-reaching hypothetical. The report says White House officials have met with lobbyists in such a fashion hundreds of times since January 20, 2009. All while Barack Obama publicly goes after lobbyists, talks up transparency, and attacks the longstanding culture of members of Congress meeting with special interest groups.

But wait, there’s more!

Attempts to put distance between the White House and lobbyists are not limited to meetings. Some lobbyists say that they routinely get e-mail messages from White House staff members’ personal accounts rather than from their official White House accounts, which can become subject to public review. Administration officials said there were some permissible exceptions to a federal law requiring staff members to use their official accounts and retain the correspondence.

And while Mr. Obama has imposed restrictions on hiring lobbyists for government posts, the administration has used waivers and recusals more than two dozen times to appoint lobbyists to political positions. Two lobbyists also cited instances in which the White House had suggested that a job candidate be “deregistered” as a lobbyist in Senate records to avoid violating the administration’s hiring restrictions.

By the way, those coffee shop meetings were just the lobbyist interactions the White House is trying to hide. The NYT reports that lobbyists have been openly welcomed through the Obama Administration’s door more than 1,000 times since Obama’s inauguration. And even those meetings aren’t transparent:

Those logs, though, present an incomplete picture. For instance, many of the entries do not reflect who actually took part in a meeting. The “visitee” often shows up not as the White House official who was the host, but as the administrative assistant who arranged the meeting.

And then there are the off-property follow-up meetings.

Lobbyists say some White House officials will agree to an initial meeting with a lobbyist and his client at the White House, but then plan follow-up sessions at a site not subject to the visitors’ log.

One lobbyist recounted meeting with White House officials on a side lawn outside the building to introduce them to the chief executive of a major foreign corporation.

“I’ll call and say, ‘I want to talk to you about X,’ and they’ll say, ‘Sure, let’s talk at Starbucks,’ ” said another lobbyist who counted six or seven off-site meetings with White House officials on financial issues.

Employees at the Caribou Coffee shop, the White House’s reported favorite meeting spot for lobbyists, say White House officials are in there all of the time, often for long periods of time. White House employees can apparently be identified by their security badges and the occasional Secret Service agent hanging around.

Bottom line: No one should be surprised that the Obama Administration has been talking up transparency from one side of its mouth while scheduling an off-record follow-up meeting with a top lobbyist at the local coffee shop.