I’ve always thought the fight between the General Accounting Office and Dick Cheney’s office over the vice president’s secret meetings with energy company officials was a lot of fun. For me, this has been the Great White House Scandal That Couldn’t.
As you may know, shortly after getting inaugurated in 2001, Bush placed Cheney in charge of overseeing a White House task force responsible for crafting the administration’s energy policy. Naturally, Cheney developed a policy that called for increased energy production, not conservation, and recommended initiatives such as drilling in the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge.
Who helped Cheney arrive at these conclusions? Cheney met with his friends and contributors from the oil and energy industries, though no one outside the White House knows any details on how Cheney’s task force operated because every detail of the working group’s meetings were kept top secret.
No contacts, no meeting notes, no dates, and no phone logs were to be shared with anyone, not even Congress. In fact, when the General Accounting Office, Congress’ non-partisan investigative arm, asked to see the list of who was consulted during the process, Cheney refused. This led to the first-ever instance of the GAO taking the White House to court to obtain information.
Earlier this year, the GAO suit was dismissed due to separation-of-powers issues, but a privately-launched lawsuit against Cheney and the task force, initiated by the Sierra Club and Judicial Watch, is still ongoing, despite the administration’s unsuccessful efforts to squash that suit too.
Interesting details surfaced this week about the GAO’s efforts to gather information from Cheney and his task force. (I’m a little late in writing about this — information came to public attention on Monday — but it’s still worth talking about.) Unfortunately, the GAO report reinforced many of the concerns about the administration’s unnecessarily secretive tactics.
As the Washington Post reported, “The White House collaborated heavily with corporations in developing President Bush’s energy policy but repeatedly refused to give congressional investigators details of the meetings.”
The GAO report explained that the administration relied on the advice of CEOs and lobbyists for the petroleum, electricity, nuclear, coal, chemical, and natural gas industries while largely ignoring environmentalists, conservationists, and academics. One of the executives awarded exclusive access to Cheney was Enron’s “Kenny Boy” Lay.
The report documented how the administration tirelessly resisted cooperating with the GAO in nearly every area. Indeed, Cheney’s task force refused to account for how his group spent public funds and would not even say if anyone had taken notes during the 10 Cabinet-level meetings the task force held in 2001.
The GAO specifically decried the vice president’s office’s “persistent denial of access” to task force records. The report added that the administration’s drive to operate in absolute secrecy “precluded the GAO from fully achieving our objectives and substantially limited our analysis.”
This, in and of itself, is pretty scandalous. Here we have an independent arm of Congress effectively accusing the vice president of stonewalling an official investigation and shunning any and all public accountability.
It was, in short, one big cover up.
And, according to John Dean, former White House counsel to Richard Nixon (who knew a thing or two about cover-ups), Cheney may have even broken a few laws along the way by submitting false statements to Congress.
As Dean explained, “On August 2, 2001, Vice President Cheney sent a letter — personally signed by him — to Congress demanding, in essence, that it get the Comptroller off his back. In the letter, he claimed that his staff had already provided ‘documents responsive to the Comptroller General’s inquiry concerning the costs associated with the [Energy task force’s] work.'” Dean added, “[T]his turned out to be a lie.”
Lying to Congress, Dean reminds us, is a crime.
Ultimately, however, Cheney appears to be paying little price for Task Force-Gate (Energy-gate? I’m still playing around with names for the scandal). The whole thing appears to be too complex to fit into a 30-second TV commercial, and unlike some of the Bush administration’s other scandals, no one died as a result of their deceptions.
Nevertheless, when I look back at the 90s and think that a not-so-independent investigator spent millions looking into things like the Clintons’ firings of the White House travel office and the so-called File-gate scandal, I just have to laugh at the incredibly lax standards applied to the Bush presidency.