Leaving No Tracks (Cheney and the Environment, WaPo) [View All]

http://www.netscape.com/viewstory/2007/06/26/the-cheney-vice-presidency-part-4-environmental-policy/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fblog.washingtonpost.com%2Fcheney%2Fchapters%2Fleaving_no_tracks%2Findex.html

Sue Ellen Wooldridge, the 19th-ranking Interior Department official, arrived at her desk in Room 6140 a few months after Inauguration Day 2001. A phone message awaited her.

"This is Dick Cheney," said the man on her voice mail, Wooldridge recalled in an interview. "I understand you are the person handling this Klamath situation. Please call me at -- hmm, I guess I don't know my own number. I'm over at the White House."

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The vice president has intervened in many cases to undercut long-standing environmental rules for the benefit of business. Here, Cheney is photographed during an August 2004 family vacation in Moose, Wyoming. Getty Images
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Wooldridge wrote off the message as a prank. It was not. Cheney had reached far down the chain of command, on so unexpected a point of vice presidential concern, because he had spotted a political threat arriving on Wooldridge's desk.

In Oregon, a battleground state that the Bush-Cheney ticket had lost by less than half of 1 percent, drought-stricken farmers and ranchers were about to be cut off from the irrigation water that kept their cropland and pastures green. Federal biologists said the Endangered Species Act left the government no choice: The survival of two imperiled species of fish was at stake.

<unfortunately, much more>