Watchdog Group Loses Vice-Presidential Disclosure Case
A federal judge dismissed a lawsuit January 19 that sought to force former Vice President Dick Cheney to give to the National Archives all his records pertaining to his Executive Branch duties. The decision of U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly ended a five-month injunction mandating the preservation of Cheney’s records, and comes only two weeks after the House overwhelmingly passed a bill that voided Executive Order 13233, in which President George W. Bush gave the incumbent or former presidents and vice presidents, as well as their heirs, latitude to withhold the release of presidential papers indefinitely.
In a 63-page ruling (PDF file), Judge Kollar-Kotelly stressed that the plaintiff, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), did not present any evidence that the Office of the Vice President (OVP) planned to withhold or destroy records that should be archived, despite the inability or unwillingness of OVP to “maintain consistent factual positions.” She wrote that, because the Presidential Records Act of 1978 “incorporates an assumption made by Congress . . . that subsequent Presidents and Vice Presidents would comply with the Act in good faith . . . Congress limited the scope of judicial review and provided little oversight authority for the President and Vice President’s document preservation decisions.”
Praising “organizations like the American Library Association for having finally gotten the public’s attention about the importance of these records,” CREW Chief Counsel Anne Weismann told American Libraries that the group had 60 days to decide whether to appeal, but that “the Bush administration’s treatment of presidential records and federal records has really highlighted that there are loopholes in the law that need to be plugged.” Among the legislative remedies Weismann favors is “a greater role for the archivist” in delineating what needs to be kept and an effective recordkeeping system for tactile and electronic records. “It’s important that the ground rules be clarified from the outset for the current administration,” she said.
Ironically, the Obama administration now finds itself in the position of defending Bush-era e-mail-retention practices in an ongoing lawsuit brought by CREW and the National Security Agency in 2007. The Bush administration objected (PDF file) January 15 to “a pretty broad preservation order” issued the day before, Weismann explained, noting that the situation puts the Obama administration’s Justice Department in the awkward position of “defending policies and practices that aren’t theirs [with] limited access to info about the lawsuit.”
Posted on January 21, 2009. Discuss.