Posted on 06/01/2007 6:01:39 AM PDT by LurkedLongEnough
WASHINGTON -- A newly disclosed effort to keep Vice President Dick Cheney's visitor records secret is the latest White House push to make sure the public doesn't learn who has been meeting with top officials in the Bush administration.
Over the past year, lawyers for President George W. Bush and Cheney have directed the Secret Service to maintain the confidentiality of visitor entry and exit logs, declaring them to be presidential records, exempt from a law requiring their disclosure to whoever asks to see them.
The drive to keep the logs secret, the administration says, is essential to assuring that the president and vice president receive candid advice to carry out their duties.
Cabinet officers often don't want to give up their meeting calendars to journalists. They have no choice under the Freedom of Information Act, which provides public access to some records kept by federal agencies.
But the FOIA disclosure law, which doesn't apply to Congress, also doesn't apply to presidential records.
The Bush administration has exploited that difference, triggering a battle in the courts.
The administration is seeking dismissal of two lawsuits by a private group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, demanding Secret Service visitor logs.
In trying to get the cases thrown out, the Justice Department has filed documents in court outlining a behind-the-scenes debate over whether Secret Service records are subject to public disclosure. The discussions date back at least to the administration of President Bush's father and involve the Justice Department and the National Archives as well as the White House and the Secret Service.
The government's court filings show that the Bush White House focused on the issue in the months before Election Day 2004.
Discussions moved into high gear when the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal prompted news organizations and private groups to demand that the administration turn over Secret Service records of visitors to the White House complex and the vice president's residence.
There was precedent for the demands.
During the Clinton administration, Republican-controlled congressional committees obtained Secret Service visitor logs while conducting investigations of the president and first lady.
Christopher Lehane, a former special assistant counsel to President Clinton and press secretary to then-Vice President Al Gore, points out the political implications of the Bush administration campaign to close off access to the records.
"The question it raises is 'what are these guys hiding?"' said Lehane, now a Democratic consultant. "They can live with it because they've only got a year or so left, but it doesn't do a lot for public confidence in open government."
White House spokesman Tony Fratto said Thursday, "I can't comment on a case in litigation, and I can't speak to the decisions made by other administrations."
The Bush administration says it is standing on principle.
"It is important that the president be able to receive candid advice from his staff and other members of the administration," Fratto said. "To ensure that he receives candid advice, it is essential as a general matter that the advice remains confidential."
In a declaration filed in court a week ago, Cheney's deputy chief of staff, Claire O'Donnell, stated that "systematic public release of the information regarding when and with whom the vice president and vice presidential personnel conduct meetings would impinge on the ability of the OVP (office of the vice president) to gather information in confidence and perform its essential functions, including assisting the vice president in his critical roles of advising and assisting the president."
In May 2006, the Secret Service and the White House signed a memorandum of understanding designating visitor records as presidential.
They are "not the records of an 'agency' subject to the Freedom of Information Act," says the agreement that was not disclosed until months later, in late 2006. The records are "at all times under the exclusive legal custody and control of the White House."
Four months after the memorandum of agreement, Cheney's counsel wrote the Secret Service, stating that visitor records for the vice president's personal residence "are and shall remain subject to the exclusive ownership, custody and control of OVP."
The Sept. 13, 2006, date on the Cheney letter coincides with requests by The Washington Post seeking records on the vice president's visitors under the Freedom of Information Act.
The law enforcement agency "shall not retain any copy of these documents and information upon return to OVP," stated the letter to the Secret Service's chief counsel.
"If any documents remain in your possession, please return them to OVP as soon as possible," the letter added.
The Justice Department filed the Cheney letter last Friday in one of the lawsuits brought by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which is invoking the FOIA law in seeking the identities of conservative religious leaders who visited the White House complex and the vice president's residence. The group, which represents Valerie Plame and her husband in their lawsuit against Cheney and other key administration figures in the leak of Plame's CIA identity, also is seeking White House visitor logs in the Abramoff scandal.
According to government documents, the Secret Service routinely destroyed five of eight categories of information relating to visitors to Cheney's residence. Of the records it retained, the Secret Service regularly turned over handwritten visitor logs to Cheney's office.
The Secret Service stopped the destruction in June 2006 because of lawsuits by various groups, according to the court papers. The law enforcement agency also is retaining copies of the material, contrary to the directive in the September 2006 letter from Cheney's counsel.
The court filings by the government show that:
On three occasions late in the administration of the first President Bush and during the first term of President Bill Clinton, the Secret Service proposed treating copies of White House visitor documents as non-presidential records. In its court filings, the current Bush administration opposes releasing details of the Secret Service proposals, saying this "poses a substantial risk of creating public confusion" because the proposals were never adopted.Presidential records are released starting five years after a president leaves office. Under the Presidential Records Act of 1978, non-classified material is disclosed first, with classified documents and advice to the president released later after review by federal agencies, the White House and the former president.In January 2001, as Clinton prepared to leave office, White House lawyers proposed the transfer of visitor records from the Secret Service to the White House. The proposal was entitled "Disposition of certain presidential records created by the USSS," or the Secret Service. The records are now at the Clinton library in Little Rock, Ark., the National Archives confirmed Thursday.
In September 2004, a lawyer for the Bush White House and a special assistant to the director of the Secret Service proposed "informal views on one way to address the disposition" of visitor records, according to court documents. The unnamed associate White House counsel and the Secret Service assistant jointly authored a July 29, 2004, document bearing the same title as the Clinton administration document from 3½ years earlier.
In July 2005, the Secret Service gave a presentation on the issue to the White House counsel's office, the Justice Department and the National Archives.
On May 11, 2006, the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel provided a legal opinion on the issue, which is among the many documents the government is refusing to disclose. Six days later, the White House and the Secret Service signed the agreement designating the records as presidential.
Under an executive order President Bush signed in 2001, the archivist of the United States cannot unilaterally release the records without the permission of the current president, former presidents and their representatives.
"The scary thing about this move by the vice president's office is the power grab part of it," said Tom Blanton, head of the National Security Archive, a private group which uses the FOIA law to pierce government secrecy.
"We're looking at a huge problem if the White House can reach into any agency and say certain records have something to do with the White House and they are presidential from now on," Blanton said. "This White House has been infinitely creative in finding new ways and new forms of government secrecy."
It is the policy of the agency to make records available to the public to the greatest extent possible, in keeping with the spirit of the FOIA, while at the same time protecting sensitive information. The following is a list of FOIA exemptions which apply to Government information in accordance with 5 U.S.C. 552(b):
http://www.corporateservices.noaa.gov/~foia/foiaex.html
It looks to me like there is no exemption for visitor logs without a very clever pleading and a friendly judge....
Why don’t we have a look at your bank and tax records... Might be hiding something.
Maybe Bartlett quitting has something to do with this.
While I can not say if the person who posted the article an elected official, I suspect not. There are some negative repercussion of making everything public BUT they are not trusted by many people here anymore.
When you live in the light, you don’t have anything to hide.............
Congressman Billybob
I don’t have a problem with this, especially as it relates to who comes and goes at the private residence.
What next? We put camera’s in the residence, and make them available 24/7/365 via the web?
This is just another front in the "hate Bush", "gotcha Bush" ongoing onslaught and another case where the baby may be thrown out with the bathwater.
The real problem is that the President has squandered all political capital with his devious support of amnesty for illegals. So now, he's being deserted by his former supporters on issues he SHOULD be supported on.....like this one.
I don't believe I'm going out on a limb when I say that his support for the war in Iraq and on terror is atrophying in direct correlation to his immigration obsession.
This spillover to other issues such as the attack on executive confidentiality is one of many unintended consequences of Bush's ill-advised crusade for amnesty. He is hurting this country in so many ways because of his obsession.
He's unwittingly becoming dangerous to many established facets of our political system because he's left himself open to leftist attacks and destruction along with many good things he supports.
Leni
Maybe it’s just so Jeff Gannon can do a few discreet interviews.
“The question it raises is ‘what are these guys hiding?”’ said Lehane, now a Democratic consultant. “They can live with it because they’ve only got a year or so left, but it doesn’t do a lot for public confidence in open government.”
They don’t want us to see all the coordination meetings with National Council of La Raza and other assorted racist, pro amnesty groups.
“Why don’t we have a look at your bank and tax records... Might be hiding something.”
The government is accountable to us.
Not vice versa.
Welcome to the USSA!
Corrupt like Clinton
Incompetent like Carter
LOL! So.... George Soros wants to see the visitor logs?!
Funny how President Bush is getting ready to make all these new rules that future Presidents will enjoy and the problem is that we are not always going to have a Republican President much to our disappointment so why are we changing all these rules now???
Dems on another fishing expedition.
has all the fingerprints of Rep Waxman, who is in cahoots with liberal journalists to manufacture scandal based on whatever he can find.
“Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington,”
I believe this is a Soros-funded outfit which has as most of its staffers liberal Democrats.
Are *their* visitor logs Public? :-)
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