Bush, Cheney claim oversight exemption on classified information

Vice President Dick Cheney has asserted his office is not a part of the executive branch of the US government, and therefore not bound by a presidential order governing the protection of classified information by government agencies, according to a new letter from Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) to Cheney. The White House said on June 22 that, like Cheney's office, President Bush's office is not allowing an independent federal watchdog to oversee its handling of classified national security information. The issue flared on June 21 when Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles) criticized Cheney for refusing to file annual reports with the federal National Archives and Records Administration, for refusing to spell out how his office handles classified documents, and for refusing to submit to an inspection by the archives' Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO). An executive order that Bush issued in March 2003–amending an existing order–requires all government agencies that are part of the executive branch to submit to oversight. Although it doesn't specifically say so, Bush's order was not meant to apply to the vice president's office or the president's office, a White House spokesman said. William Leonard, head of the ISOO, told Waxman's staff that Cheney's office has refused to provide his staff with details regarding classified documents or submit to a routine inspection as required by presidential order, according to Waxman. In pointed letters released by Waxman, ISOO's Leonard twice questioned Cheney's office on its assertion it was exempt from the rules. He received no reply, but the vice president later tried to get rid of Leonard's office entirely, according to Waxman. Waxman, chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, disclosed Cheney's effort to shut down the oversight office. Waxman, who has had a leading role in the stepped-up efforts by Democrats to investigate the Bush administration, outlined the matter in an eight-page letter sent on June 21 to the vice president and posted, along with other documentation, on the committee's website. Officials at the National Archives and the Justice Department confirmed the basic chronology of events cited in Waxman's letter. The letter said that after repeatedly refusing to comply with a routine annual request from the archives for data on his staff's classification of internal documents, the vice president's office in 2004 blocked an on-site inspection of records that other agencies of the executive branch regularly go through. But the National Archives is an executive branch department headed by a presidential appointee, and it is assigned to collect the data on classified documents under a presidential executive order. Its ISOO is the archives division that oversees classification and declassification. "I know the vice president wants to operate with unprecedented secrecy," Waxman said in an interview. "But this is absurd. This order is designed to keep classified information safe. His argument is really that he's not part of the executive branch, so he doesn't have to comply." The archives administration has been pressing the vice president's office to cooperate with oversight for the last several years, contending that by not doing so, Cheney and his staff have created a potential national security risk. Bush amended the oversight directive in response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks to help ensure that national secrets would not be mishandled, made public or improperly declassified. The order aimed to create a uniform system for classifying, declassifying and otherwise safeguarding national security information. It gave the archives' oversight unit responsibility for evaluating the effectiveness of each agency's classification programs. It applied to the executive branch of government, mostly agencies led by Bush administration appointees–not to legislative offices such as Congress or to judicial offices such as the courts. "Our democratic principles require that the American people be informed of the activities of their government," the executive order said. Cheney's office filed the reports in 2001 and 2002 but stopped in 2003. As a result, the National Archives has been unable to review how much information the president's and vice president's offices are classifying and declassifying. And the security oversight office cannot inspect the president and vice president's executive offices to determine whether safeguards are in place to protect the classified information they handle and to properly declassify information when required. Those two offices have access to the most highly classified information, including intelligence on terrorists and unfriendly foreign countries. Waxman and Leonard have argued that the order clearly applies to all executive branch agencies, including the offices of the vice president and the president. The White House disagrees, White House Spokesman Tony Fratto said. "We don't dispute that the ISOO has a different opinion. But let's be very clear: This executive order was issued by the president, and he knows what his intentions were," Fratto said. "He is in compliance with his executive order." Fratto conceded that the lengthy directive, technically an amendment to an existing executive order, did not specifically exempt the president's or vice president's offices. Instead, it refers to "agencies" as being subject to the requirements, which Fratto said did not include the two executive offices. "It does take a little bit of inference," Fratto said. Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists' government secrecy project, disputed the White House explanation of the executive order. He noted that the order defines "agency" as any executive agency, military department and "any other entity within the executive branch that comes into the possession of classified information"–which, he said, includes Bush's and Cheney's offices. Leonard has also argued in a series of letters to Addington that the vice president's office is indeed such an entity. He noted that previous vice presidents had complied with the request for data on documents classified and declassified, and that Cheney did so in 2001 and 2002. Addington did not reply in writing to Leonard's letters, according to officials familiar with their exchanges. But Addington stated in conversations that the vice president's office was not an "entity within the executive branch" because, under the Constitution, the vice president also plays a role in the legislative branch, as president of the Senate, able to cast a vote in the event of a tie. Waxman rejected that argument. "He doesn't have classified information because of his legislative function," Waxman said of Cheney. "It's because of his executive function." Several security experts said they were not aware that the president had exempted his own office from the oversight requirements. But they said it fit what they saw as a pattern in the administration of avoiding accountability, even on matters of national security. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was asked in January to resolve the legal dispute, but he has not yet ruled on the issue. The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, led by Waxman is investigating the matter. As part of an interagency review of Executive Order 12958, Cheney's office proposed eliminating appeals to the attorney general–precisely the avenue Leonard was taking. According to Waxman's investigation, the vice president's staff also proposed abolishing the ISOO. The interagency group revising the executive order has rejected those proposals, according to Waxman. Cheney's penchant for secrecy has long been a striking feature of the Bush administration, beginning with his fight to keep confidential the identities of the energy industry officials who advised his task force on national energy policy in 2001. Cheney took that dispute to the Supreme Court and won.