{"id":9768,"date":"2007-01-29T16:33:26","date_gmt":"2007-01-29T21:33:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/9768.html"},"modified":"2007-01-29T16:33:26","modified_gmt":"2007-01-29T21:33:26","slug":"who-works-for-cheney","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/who-works-for-cheney\/","title":{"rendered":"Who works for Cheney?"},"content":{"rendered":"

David Kurtz suggested<\/a> over the weekend that it’s “time to shine some light” on the Office of the Vice President. TPM Muckraker seems to have taken it as a direct challenge. Step one<\/a>: figure out who works for Dick Cheney. They may be public employees, being paid by the public treasury, but finding out who they are isn’t nearly as easy one might assume.<\/p>\n

We called Leadership Directories, Inc., a private company which publishes expensive telephone books listing federal officials. OVP routinely shares information on roughly 30 employees, they told us. Of course, that’s likely less than half the number of staffers in his office: in the January issue of the Washington Monthly, Laura Rozen estimates<\/a> Cheney’s staff size to be 88, plus various experts assigned temporary duty to OVP by their federal agencies. (The largest concentration of staff in a single area is likely to be in Cheney’s national security staff: in 2005, Foreign Policy’s David Rothkopf asserted<\/a> (reg. req.) that Cheney has the largest national security staff of any vice president ever, with guesses ranging from 15 to 35 at any given time.)<\/p>\n

Cheney’s office refuses to give any details to reporters. His office is exempt from the Freedom of Information Act, so any such request would be futile. What’s more, Cheney appears to have exempted his office from having to disclose the number of appointed officials in his ranks: all other agencies have to release theirs for a government directory known as the “Plum Book.”<\/p>\n

Published every four years, the volume is supposed to list every position in the federal government that is assigned to a political appointee. Cheney’s list was a more dangerous secret than even the CIA’s. In the most recent edition published in 2004, the book shows the CIA as having eight such spots; it shows none for the vice president’s office.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Needless to say, no other Vice President has ever operated this way (and if I only had a nickel for every time I’ve seen that sentence the last six years…).<\/p>\n

Laura Rozen, working on a piece for the Washington Monthly, asked about a staffer who had been rumored to have joined the VP’s staff. A Cheney’s press secretary told her<\/a>, “If we have a personnel announcement we’d like you to know about, we’ll tell you.”
\n
\nRobert Dreyfuss wrote the definitive piece<\/a> on the subject last May for The American Prospect on Dick Cheney’s hyper-secretive, strikingly powerful White House operation. Speculation about how Cheney controls an insular group of ideologues, if anything, understates the case.<\/p>\n

Notoriously opaque, the Office of the Vice President (OVP) is very difficult for journalists to penetrate. But a Prospect investigation shows that the key to Cheney\u2019s influence lies with the corps of hard-line acolytes he assembled in 2001. They serve not only as his eyes and ears, monitoring a federal bureaucracy that resists many of Cheney\u2019s pet initiatives, but sometimes serve as his fists, too, when the man from Wyoming feels that the passive-aggressive bureaucrats need bullying. Like disciplined Bolsheviks slicing through a fractious opposition, Cheney\u2019s team operates with a single-minded, ideological focus on the exercise of American military power, a belief in the untrammeled power of the presidency, and a fierce penchant for secrecy. [\u2026]<\/p>\n

At the high-water mark of neoconservative power, when coalition forces invaded Iraq in March 2003, the vice president\u2019s office was the command center for a web of like-minded officials in the White House, the Pentagon, the State Department, and other agencies, often described by former officials as \u201cDick Cheney\u2019s spies.\u201d Now, thanks to a misguided war and a bungled occupation, along with a string of foreign-policy failures that have alienated U.S. allies and triggered a wave of anti-American feeling around the globe, the numbers and influence of those Cheneyites outside the office have receded. No longer quite so commanding, the office seems more like a bunker for neoconservatives and their fellow travelers in the administration. Yet if only because of Dick Cheney\u2019s Rasputin-like hold over the president, his office remains a formidable power indeed.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The State Department has a policy idea the OVP doesn’t like? It dies quickly and quietly. The National Security Council has an initiative it wants the president to consider, but the OVP disagrees? It’s never heard from again. (Indeed, Cheney’s office has its own \u201cshadow NSC,\u201d filled with loyalists, ideologues, and think-tank partisans, which operates independently — from everyone.)<\/p>\n

None of Cheney’s 88 employees is accessible to a reporter for a question (unless one happens to be leaking the identity of an undercover CIA agent). Asked who works in the OVP, a Cheney press secretary said, “We just don’t give out that kind of information.” No one can know who they are or what they do.<\/p>\n

Kurtz argued<\/a> that this obsession with unnecessary secrecy is “about a perverse sense of entitlement and a deep aversion to scrutiny and accountability. It is anti-democratic.” It is, indeed.<\/p>\n

To date, I’m not aware of a single reporter asking Cheney about this in any of his many media interviews. The VP seems to be making the rounds lately; maybe some enterprising reporter might be willing to broach the subject?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

David Kurtz suggested over the weekend that it’s “time to shine some light” on the Office of the Vice President. TPM Muckraker seems to have taken it as a direct challenge. Step one: figure out who works for Dick Cheney. They may be public employees, being paid by the public treasury, but finding out who […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9768","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9768","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9768"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9768\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9768"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9768"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9768"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}