Last week, the Senate Commerce Committee held a hearing over escalating energy prices, featuring testimony from the CEOs from the nation’s biggest oil companies. Committee Chairman Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) rejected calls to have the executives testify under oath. Today, it’s a little clearer why.
Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.) asked the five CEOs if their company, of any of its representatives, participated in Vice President Cheney’s energy task force in 2001. They denied involvement.
That apparently wasn’t quite true.
A White House document shows that executives from big oil companies met with Vice President Cheney’s energy task force in 2001 — something long suspected by environmentalists but denied as recently as last week by industry officials testifying before Congress.
The document, obtained this week by The Washington Post, shows that officials from Exxon Mobil Corp., Conoco (before its merger with Phillips), Shell Oil Co. and BP America Inc. met in the White House complex with the Cheney aides who were developing a national energy policy, parts of which became law and parts of which are still being debated.
In a joint hearing last week of the Senate Energy and Commerce committees, the chief executives of Exxon Mobil Corp., Chevron Corp. and ConocoPhillips said their firms did not participate in the 2001 task force. The president of Shell Oil said his company did not participate “to my knowledge,” and the chief of BP America Inc. said he did not know.
Chevron was not named in the White House document, but the Government Accountability Office has found that Chevron was one of several companies that “gave detailed energy policy recommendations” to the task force. In addition, Cheney had a separate meeting with John Browne, BP’s chief executive, according to a person familiar with the task force’s work; that meeting is not noted in the document.
In one sense, the revelation about Cheney’s dependence on Big Oil to shape the nation’s energy policy isn’t new. Despite the White House’s refusal to cooperate with a Government Accountability Office investigation, we learned in 2003 that Cheney “collaborated heavily” with chief executive officers of petroleum, electricity, nuclear, coal, chemical, and natural gas companies, including a series of private sessions with Enron’s “Kenny Boy” Lay. It’s the reason the White House fought so hard to keep the secret meetings hidden from the public.
But it’s the Lautenberg angle that makes this particular revelation interesting.
Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.), who posed the question about the task force, said he will ask the Justice Department today to investigate. “The White House went to great lengths to keep these meetings secret, and now oil executives may be lying to Congress about their role in the Cheney task force,” Lautenberg said. […]
The executives were not under oath when they testified, so they are not vulnerable to charges of perjury; committee Democrats had protested the decision by Commerce Chairman Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) not to swear in the executives. But a person can be fined or imprisoned for up to five years for making “any materially false, fictitious or fraudulent statement or representation” to Congress.
Here are a few questions to ponder:
* Did Ted Stevens intentionally skip the swearing-in process because he knew this might come up? Would a committee chairman intentionally help witnesses hide information from his own committee?
* Will the Justice Department follow up on the CEOs possibly having lied to Congress, which is a felony?
* Does Cheney, who remained silent while his Big Oil buddies were misleading lawmakers, have even more interesting secrets his energy task force files?
* Can the administration really withstand another political scandal right now?
Stay tuned.