Cheney's papers are the Amazon rain forest of Bush administration records

Last Secrets of the Bush Administration

Wednesday 03 December 2008

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by: Charles Homans, The Washington Monthly


"When Bush hands over the keys to the White House in January, he will leave behind more unanswered questions of sweeping national importance than any modern president." (Photo: Charles Dharapak / AP)

How to find out what we still don't know.

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Weismann had been a Justice lawyer for twenty years, and had appeared often in Sullivan's court. But this case was different. "I've never seen him that angry-he wouldn't even let me talk," she recalled recently. The encounter made her rethink what she was doing. Weismann still believes that there were limited legal arguments to make in defense of keeping the energy task force records secret. But what drove Cheney was something bigger. The case would ultimately wind its way to the Supreme Court, after Cheney's legal team claimed to Sullivan that executive privilege meant the White House didn't have to hand over anything to the courts if he didn't feel like it. But by the time the Supreme Court ruled in Cheney's favor, Weismann was no longer representing the vice president. The day Sullivan read her the riot act in district court, she says, "was the point at which I said, ‘I have to stop doing this.' "

Weismann told me this story in mid-October, in a McPherson Square office suite belonging to the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), where she is now chief counsel. The floor of her office was half obscured by rows of accordion folders full of papers. Among them were the briefs for a case she is now litigating against her old client, Dick Cheney.

In September, CREW sued Cheney to preempt any attempts he might make to destroy or remove the records of his vice presidency when he left office. The suit was prompted by a bit of fine print Weismann had noticed in Bush's November 2001 executive order instituting the two-key system. The administration's lawyers had written that the Presidential Records Act applied only to the vice president's "executive records." Weismann realized that this subtly narrowed definition could exclude many of Cheney's most important papers, including his personal files and any records of his work on the National Security Council and as president of the Senate. "There were all these holes," she says.

A growing body of investigative reporting and memoirs by Bush White House insiders-turned-dissenters suggests that most of the administration's most controversial national security decisions-on wiretapping, the Iraq War, and renditions-originated in the Office of the Vice President, hashed out by Cheney, vice presidential counsel David Addington, and aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby. Cheney's papers are the Amazon rain forest of Bush administration records: they are of immense importance to the big picture, and there is a real risk that they will be lost before we know exactly what's in there. If there is one overarching priority between now and January 20, it is to surround Cheney's office with every possible legal barrier to removing so much as a Post-it Note from the premises.

much more at:
http://www.truthout.org/120308D