What official White House records track President George W. Bush’s days away from Washington 2001–2009?

1. The White House Visitor’s Logs — a primary domestic trail

The White House Visitor’s Logs, released under FOIA and held at the George W. Bush Presidential Library, are organized as daily spreadsheets (one per letter of the alphabet per day) and record who signed into White House spaces; researchers have used them to infer presence in Washington versus absences when events or sign-ins are absent from the log or when the President’s presence is recorded elsewhere ^{[1] [4]}.

2. Official White House postings and event timelines — day-by-day public schedule

The Bush White House maintained an events/timeline and posted daily public activities and press materials on georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov, which provide explicit listings of speeches, ceremonies and travel-related announcements that mark days the President was in Washington or traveling, and the American Presidency Project also compiles an event timeline useful for cross-checking those public entries ^{[2] [6]}.

3. State Department and Office of the Historian travel records for foreign trips

For presidential foreign travel, the Office of the Historian at the State Department maintains a “Travels of the President” record that documents international trips and itineraries; those records are authoritative for days abroad and complement White House domestic records when establishing whether the President was physically in Washington ^[3].

4. Electronic records, video archives and the Presidential Records Act — corroborating evidence

NARA’s custody of more than 29,000 cubic feet of Bush-era textual materials and the Electronic Records Archive (ERA) means emails, calendar entries, video recordings and White House Communications Agency footage can corroborate specific days and movements; the Bush Library’s electronic holdings (including ARMS email through 2007 and restored Exchange archives) and the White House video collection are thus auxiliary official sources for reconstructing days away from Washington ^{[4] [5] [7]}.

5. What official record does not exist as a single definitive “days away” ledger

There is no single published official “days away from Washington” spreadsheet or government-issued tally in the sources provided; instead, archival systems and discrete record series — visitor logs, event timelines, travel logs, electronic records and video material — must be combined to produce an authoritative count or timeline, and the George W. Bush Library/NARA is the custodian that aggregates those records under the Presidential Records Act ^{[1] [4] [5]}.

6. How researchers and critics use these sources — and the politics of counting

Researchers, journalists and partisan entities have historically used the Bush visitor logs, web postings and travel lists to calculate vacation days (notably at Crawford, Texas), a practice that can be contested depending on definitions (e.g., whether “working from the ranch” counts as “away”); public interest in presidential vacations has political overtones, and secondary sources like Wikipedia and historical summaries reflect both factual trip listings and the contested interpretations of what constitutes “time away” ^{[8] [9] [10]}.

Conclusion

In short, the official White House records that track President Bush’s physical presence during 2001–2009 are distributed across the George W. Bush Presidential Library holdings — especially the White House Visitor’s Logs — the archived White House event timeline and press records, the State Department’s presidential travel listings for foreign trips, and NARA’s electronic and video archives; assembling an exact “days away from Washington” count therefore requires cross-referencing these official record series rather than consulting a single pre-made government ledger ^{[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]}.