Well, this could certainly be interesting.
A federal judge has ordered the Bush administration to release information about who visited Vice President Dick Cheney’s office and personal residence, an order that could spark a late election season debate over lobbyists’ White House access.
The Washington Post asked for two years of White House visitor logs in June but the Secret Service refused to process the request. Government attorneys called it “a fishing expedition into the most sensitive details of the vice presidency.”
U.S. District Judge Ricardo M. Urbina ruled Wednesday that, by the end of next week, the Secret Service must produce the records or at least identity them and justify why they are being withheld.
The WaPo has asked for logs for anyone visiting Cheney, his legal counsel, or pretty much anyone in the VP’s office. For some reason, Cheney’s gang has been a little shy.
What’s the VP’s defense for keeping his meetings secret? According to Cheney’s lawyers, he wants to get “good advice,” which discussing secret matters with secret people who know that even their visits to the White House will remain secret.
“This case is about protecting the effective functioning of the vice presidency under the Constitution,” the VP’s attorneys wrote.
Um, no.
This case is actually about testing the most secretive group of people to ever run the executive branch.
His press people seem shocked that a reporter would even ask for an interview with the staff. The blanket answer is no — nobody is available. Amazingly, the vice president’s office flatly refuses to even disclose who works there, or what their titles are. “We just don’t give out that kind of information,” says Jennifer Mayfield, another of Cheney’s “angels.” She won’t say who is on staff, or what they do? No, she insists. “It’s just not something we talk about.” The notoriously silent OVP staff rebuffs not just pesky reporters but even innocuous database researchers from companies like Carroll Publishing, which puts out the quarterly Federal Directory. “They’re tight-lipped about the kind of information they put out,” says Albert Ruffin, senior editor at Carroll, who fumes that Cheney’s office doesn’t bother returning his calls when he’s updating the limited information he manages to collect.
The OVP’s enduring obsession with absolute secrecy first became obvious during the long court battle early in Bush’s first term over the energy task force chaired by Cheney. Neither the coalition of watchdog and environmental groups that sued the OVP nor members of Congress and the Government Accountability Office discovered much about the workings of the task force. Addington, then Cheney’s general counsel, enforced the say-nothing policy ultimately upheld by federal courts. “He engineered an extraordinary expansion of government power at the expense of accountability,” says Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, the conservative gadfly group that sued Cheney. “We got a terse letter back from Addington saying essentially, ‘Go jump in the lake.'”
What’s Cheney’s office up to? It’s secret. Who works for Cheney? Secret. Who does the VP talk to? Secret. What’s the state of Cheney’s health? Secret. Today’s ruling will no doubt be appealed, but it should be a wake-up call — the Vice President works for the taxpayers, and he’s not a king.
Would the logs actually produce anything interesting? It’s hard to say, but the last time the White House lost a court fight over log access, we learned a great deal about Jack Abramoff, Grover Norquist, and Ralph Reed. I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if Cheney’s logs were even more entertaining.
Stay tuned.