# T022 — Hudson Capitol Tour Meeting Time and Location The April 14-15, 2025 Capitol tour Lawrence Berman and Brad Young of the Development Corporation for Israel made to Little Rock included a bilateral with DFA Secretary Jim Hudson on Tuesday April 15, 2025. Two Tier-1 documents from the Auditor's-office FOIA productions record the meeting time and location differently. The Wendy Spadoni 4/11/2025 1:52 PM pre-trip schedule sent to Berman places the meeting at 2:00 to 2:30 PM at "Department of Finance and Administration." The Milligan Outlook calendar invite for the same meeting places it at 3:00 to 3:30 PM at "Auditor's Capitol Office; Room 230; Arkansas State Capitol." **What was the actual time and venue of the 4/15/2025 Hudson bilateral, and what does the documentary discrepancy establish about the Capitol tour's scheduling pathway?** ## Statement A **The Milligan Outlook calendar invite is the authoritative source for the actual meeting time and venue. The Spadoni 4/11 pre-trip schedule was an early draft that was subsequently revised; the meeting actually occurred at 3:00 PM in the Auditor's Capitol Office Room 230, with Spadoni added as a mandatory participant. The Spadoni 4/11 schedule's 2:00 PM at DFA framing is superseded by the calendar invite's documentation of the meeting Milligan committed to attend.** The Milligan Outlook calendar invite documents the meeting as it appeared in Milligan's own calendar: > [!evidence] Milligan's Outlook calendar invite for the Hudson meeting, Meeting with Larry Berman, Secretary Jim Hudson, Dennis Milligan, Jason Brady.pdf p.1 (per [[auditor-foia-r2-milligan]]) > "Subject: Meeting with Larry Berman, Secretary Jim Hudson, Dennis Milligan, Jason Brady. Location: Auditor's Capitol Office; Room 230; Arkansas State Capitol. Start: Tuesday, April 15, 2025 3:00:00 PM. End: Tuesday, April 15, 2025 3:30:00 PM. Organizer: Wendy Spadoni. Mandatory participants: Wendy Spadoni; Jim Hudson; Dennis Milligan; DENNIS MILLIGAN; Jason Brady" The calendar invite is the document Milligan acted on. It is the official meeting record in the Milligan-custodian Outlook capture. The 3:00 PM start time and the Auditor's Room 230 venue are the meeting parameters Milligan committed to and attended. Spadoni — who sent the original 4/11 schedule but is also documented as the calendar invite's organizer — is included as a mandatory participant in the calendar invite but was not explicitly listed in the original 4/11 schedule. The location revision (from "Department of Finance and Administration" in the 4/11 schedule to "Auditor's Capitol Office; Room 230" in the calendar invite) shifts the meeting venue back into the Auditor's-office host space. This is consistent with the broader pattern of Auditor's-office hosting for the Capitol tour: the Hester meeting was at Auditor's Room 230 per Spadoni's schedule; the Bassett, Fecher, and Speaker Evans meetings were similarly at Auditor's-coordinated venues. The Hudson meeting fits the Auditor's-office-host pattern when located at Room 230. The time revision (from 2:00 PM to 3:00 PM) is a one-hour shift. The most likely explanation is a late-stage scheduling adjustment between Spadoni's 4/11 transmission to Berman and the meeting date — possibly Hudson's own schedule pushed the meeting back an hour, or the Auditor's office consolidated the venue at Room 230 and the time was adjusted to accommodate Auditor's-office prep or transitions between meetings. Under this reading, the documentary record establishes that the meeting occurred at 3:00 PM at Auditor's Room 230. The Spadoni 4/11 schedule is the pre-revision draft; the Milligan calendar invite is the post-revision authoritative version. The earlier wiki documentation of "2:00 PM at DFA" is superseded by this batch's calendar evidence. ## Statement B **Both documents are authoritative for their respective custodian purposes. The Spadoni 4/11 schedule is the Auditor's-office staff's pre-trip authoritative communication to Berman about where to be when. The Milligan calendar invite is Milligan's personal calendar's authoritative record of the meeting Milligan attended. The discrepancy is not adjudicable in favor of one over the other without additional evidence. The most plausible reading is that the schedule changed sometime between 4/11 and 4/15, but the documentary record does not establish when, who initiated the change, or which version Berman actually showed up to. The ASHERS-production-confirmed presence of Andy Babbitt at the meeting (per Babbitt's 4/16 "Secretary Hudson and I met yesterday with Larry and Brad" framing) is consistent with both venue options; Babbitt could have been at Hudson's DFA offices or at Auditor's Room 230 either way.** The Spadoni 4/11 schedule is the document Spadoni explicitly sent to Berman: > [!evidence] Wendy Spadoni to Lawrence Berman, April 11, 2025 - 4.pdf p.2, 4/11/2025 1:52 PM (per [[auditor-foia-r1-spadoni]]) > "Below is your schedule for Monday and Tuesday: Monday, April 14, 2025 / 9:00 - 9:30 Amy Fecher, APERS / 9:45 - 10:15 Speaker Brian Evans and Rep. Les Warren / Lunch Auditor Milligan and Jason Brady / 1:15-1:30 Sec. Darryl Bassett / Tuesday, April 15, 2025 / 8:00 - 8:30 Sen. Bart Hester, President Pro Tempore / 10:00 - 10:30 Mark White, ARTRS / 11:30 - 12:00 Treasurer John Thurston / Lunch / 2:00 - 2:30 Secretary Jim Hudson, Department of Finance and Administration" This is the document Berman would have been working from when planning his April 15 afternoon. If Berman arrived at the DFA offices at 2:00 PM expecting to meet Hudson there, that is the in-meeting reality the documentary record establishes. The fact that Milligan's Outlook calendar later showed 3:00 PM at Auditor's Room 230 does not necessarily establish that Berman was redirected before the meeting; the redirection may have been a Milligan-side calendar update Milligan made personally without affecting Berman's understanding. The Milligan calendar invite is the document in Milligan's own Outlook capture. It was produced in the Milligan-custodian R2 FOIA response, not in the Spadoni-custodian R1 batch. The calendar invite has Spadoni as organizer but the invite itself sits in Milligan's mailbox capture. Without seeing the Spadoni-side calendar capture or any Berman-acknowledgement of the revision, the documentary record cannot establish whether Berman ever received the 3:00 PM version of the schedule. Under this reading, the "schedule revision" Statement A describes may be partially or wholly conjectural. The documentary record establishes: 1. Spadoni sent Berman the 2:00 PM at DFA schedule on 4/11. 2. Milligan's Outlook calendar showed 3:00 PM at Auditor's Room 230 at some point before 4/15. 3. Babbitt attended the meeting (per [[ashers-foia-r1-3-27-26]] Babbitt 4/16 "Secretary Hudson and I met yesterday with Larry and Brad" framing). What the documentary record does NOT establish: 1. Whether Berman received any revision-of-schedule communication from Spadoni after 4/11. 2. When the Milligan-side calendar invite was created or modified. 3. Whether the actual meeting occurred at 2:00 PM at DFA or at 3:00 PM at Auditor's Room 230. 4. Whether Berman's Tuesday afternoon involved a single meeting (Hudson at one venue at one time) or whether the schedule was revised mid-day. The Capitol tour's broader scheduling pattern — Statement A's reading — also bears qualification. The Treasury R1 production at [[treasury-foia-r1-7-7-25]] documents that the 11:30 AM Thurston meeting was scheduled directly between Berman and Sandra Blount of Treasury, with the meeting located at Treasury's Capitol Suite 220 — NOT at Auditor's Room 230 (per [[auditor-multi-official-capitol-tour]] § "Treasury R1 7-7-25 production"). The Capitol tour's hosting pattern was therefore distributed, with individual offices handling their own scheduling. The Hudson meeting could have followed the same distributed pattern: Hudson at DFA at 2:00 PM (per Spadoni's communication to Berman) rather than at Auditor's Room 230 at 3:00 PM (per Milligan's personal calendar's view of the meeting). ## Why it matters This tension is load-bearing for [[auditor-multi-official-capitol-tour]] (the central concept page documenting the tour) in two specific ways. First, the meeting venue bears on the political-channel-campaign framing of the tour: if Hudson was met at DFA, the meeting was a distributed-pattern bilateral consistent with Treasury's Suite 220 hosting; if Hudson was met at Auditor's Room 230, the meeting reinforces the Auditor's-office centralization framing. Second, the documentary record's resolution either way bears on the wiki's reconstructed timeline accuracy. The tension also bears on the documentary-record's treatment of late-stage Capitol-tour scheduling changes more broadly. If schedule revisions between Spadoni's 4/11 transmission to Berman and the meeting date are routine, then other 4/11 schedule entries may also have been revised in ways the wiki cannot detect without additional documents. If schedule revisions are documented (as the Milligan-side calendar suggests for Hudson), then the wiki's reconstructed timeline for the entire 4/15 afternoon may need to be re-examined against Milligan's full calendar capture. The downstream documentary question: whether the actual 4/15 Hudson bilateral was a one-hour-later-and-at-Auditor's-Room-230 meeting reflects Auditor's-office centralization of the political-channel work the Capitol tour performs (Statement A) or whether it reflects a documented-but-unconfirmed schedule revision that the wiki cannot fully reconstruct without Berman-side or Hudson-side calendar confirmation (Statement B). ## Resolution status **Status: `open`** as of discovery date. A dialectic D022 is queued against this tension. What would resolve the tension: (1) any Spadoni-Berman or Hudson-Berman correspondence subsequent to 4/11/2025 documenting a schedule revision communication; (2) Hudson's own Outlook calendar capture for 4/15/2025 (which would establish what time and where Hudson committed to be); (3) any DFA-side scheduling document or Babbitt-side calendar capture for the meeting; (4) Berman's own calendar or trip-log documenting where he actually was at 2:00 PM and 3:00 PM on 4/15/2025; (5) any post-meeting correspondence or thank-you note specifying where the meeting occurred (Berman's 4/16/2025 thank-you to Spadoni — "extremely successful and fun trip thanks to all the efforts made by you, Jason and of course the Auditor" — does not specify any individual meeting's location). ## Discovery This tension was surfaced during the 2026-05-12 ingest of [[auditor-foia-r2-milligan]] (which produced the Milligan Outlook calendar invite with the 3:00 PM at Auditor's Room 230 parameters). The wiki's prior framing of "2:00 PM at DFA" (sourced to the Spadoni 4/11 schedule per [[auditor-foia-r1-spadoni]]) was then in direct documentary tension with the calendar invite. Filed as T022 on 2026-05-28 in conjunction with the introduction of the Hegelion layer to this wiki per [[methodology]] § II. ## Notes - Both Statements rest on the same Tier-1 evidentiary base: the Spadoni 4/11/2025 schedule email to Berman (in [[auditor-foia-r1-spadoni]]) and the Milligan Outlook calendar invite (in [[auditor-foia-r2-milligan]]). This is a factual tension over what the documentary record establishes about a single specific meeting's time and venue. - The Spadoni 4/11 schedule lists Hudson's meeting venue as "Department of Finance and Administration" — the agency name rather than a specific room. This is more abbreviated than the schedule's specification of "Suite 350 office" (Robin Voss coordination) for the Speaker meeting or "Auditor's Capitol Office; Room 230" specificity in the Milligan calendar invite. The Spadoni 4/11 abbreviation could indicate either (a) Hudson was being met at DFA's offices and the specific room was not yet known to Spadoni, or (b) Hudson's meeting was deliberately framed differently from the Auditor's-office-hosted meetings. - The tension is specifically about the 4/15 Hudson bilateral. Other Capitol tour meeting times and venues are documented consistently across the available sources. The Hudson meeting is the singular outlier where two Tier-1 documents disagree on both time and venue. - The ASHERS-side documentation of Andy Babbitt's attendance (per [[ashers-foia-r1-3-27-26]] and Babbitt's 4/16/2025 "Virtual Introductions" email to ASHERS Executive Secretary Robyn Smith) confirms the meeting occurred but does not resolve the venue: Babbitt is a DFA Deputy Director and could have been with Hudson at DFA or at Auditor's Room 230. The downstream Babbitt-Smith ASHERS introduction (per [[ashers-declined-pitch-control-case]]) is the same regardless of which venue produced it.