A letter to Waxman confirmed what had long been known: that Cheney met privately with Enron CEO Ken Lay in fashioning the White House’s energy policy. More importantly, the letter revealed what had long been suspected: that there had been an extensive web of contacts between Enron and the White House, six meetings in all, to formulate the legislation. The last meeting occurred just six days before the true nature of Enron’s financial picture became public.
Potentially damning as this information is, the vice president’s aides are probably congratulating themselves for their new come-clean policy. Still, Cheney’s troubles are far from over. The revelation of these meetings doesn’t come anywhere near to satisfying the congressional demand for information about the secretive task force Cheney led–the National Energy Policy Development Group (NEPDG). The General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, was close to hauling the vice president into court last fall when the terrorist attacks occurred and put everything on hold. Comptroller General David Walker, who heads the GAO, says he will decide within the next month whether the agency will for the first time in its history bring a lawsuit against a federal official, much less the vice president.
It is a case of extraordinary brinkmanship, one that tests the mettle of an obscure agency against a vice president in a time of war. If it weren’t for the collapse of Enron, Walker would likely have backed off. But interest in Cheney’s backstage dealings on energy policy have increased, and the odds are that Walker will call Cheney’s bluff and take him to court. We know Cheney met with Ken Lay and that Enron aides had access to the White House, but who else did Cheney and Co. meet with? How broad a spectrum of opinion did they seek? Was the task force really a summit of oil executives? “We want to know who met with whom about what, and what did it cost?” says a GAO source. “But we’re not asking who recommended what to the president, the kind of thing that could cause a real separation-of-powers problem.” Presumably once the names are available, it won’t be hard to figure out who advised what.
The standoff between Cheney’s office and the GAO dates back to April, and by the fall had begun to reach critical mass. Polls showed the public thought the Bush administration was too close to the oil industry, and there had been 20-plus editorials in major publications chiding Cheney for his refusal to make public the people he had met with. E-mails, faxes and letters to the GAO were running 60-to-one against the vice president. During the summer, Walker personally tried to reach Cheney to urge that he take the matter out of the hands of his lawyers and reach a settlement that would avoid a collision between the executive and legislative branches of government. Walker tried both directly and through intermediaries to talk to the vice president, but Cheney refused.
The GAO is relentlessly nonpartisan. Its mission is to uphold the principles of transparency and accountability in government. The notion that the vice president could form a task force, base it out of the West Wing, detail people from various departments and agencies to do the work and be shrouded in secrecy and shielded from lawmakers is anathema to the GAO as an agent of Congress. These are the same folks who hounded First Lady Hillary Clinton to reveal who was part of the White House health-care task force that she created. The GAO doesn’t act on its own; it responds to Congress. In Cheney’s case, the congressional request came from two ranking Democrats, California Rep. Henry Waxman and Michigan Rep. John Dingell.
The White House viewed the request as partisan, and rather than cooperate, Cheney saw a chance to draw a line in the sand. He’d seen how the GAO was all over the Clinton administration on the health-care task force and other pseudoscandals, and he wanted to send the signal that the Bush administration would not be trifled with in the same way. Keep in mind, Cheney was Gerald Ford’s chief of staff and George Bush I’s secretary of Defense. He had watched firsthand how executive branch powers had been eroded over time. He felt that the Clinton administration in particular, because of Clinton’s personal problems, had given away too much to the Congress.
Cheney thought this was a confrontation he could win and that it would keep the GAO and its congressional bloodhounds at bay, at least for the Bush administration. At one point the White House could have ended the whole mess with a signed certification by either the president or the director of OMB that the disclosure of the information being sought would do significant harm and was not in the interest of the government. It’s a huge loophole in the statute that governs the GAO, but it is only good if acted upon within a 20-day window.
Cheney let the moment come and go as though he were spoiling for a fight. What he didn’t count on was the Senate changing hands to the Democrats, shifting the power balance against the GOP on Capitol Hill, and the untimely bankruptcy of Enron, which a government official calls “the action-causing event.” What Walker reportedly is waiting for before he goes head-to-head with the White House is written confirmation from congressional leaders that they want him to proceed. A source says that Walker has reason to believe he will receive those letters.
What started out for Cheney as a matter of principle has now taken a very different turn. Whatever his contacts were with the titans of the energy industry, those associations will be judged in the light of what has happened to Enron. Keeping those relationships secret was never smart policy; now it threatens the very credibility of the Bush administration.
