|
 n
recent days there's been some grumbling at the General Accounting
Office and on Capitol Hill over the question of whether the White
House has been totally straight with the public when discussing
the dispute over Vice President Dick Cheney's energy-task-force
records. (See
"Is Cheney Lying?" and "The
GAO Responds.")
At first the
issue was whether the GAO is demanding that Cheney give up notes
and minutes from the meetings his task force held with outsiders
as it shaped the national energy policy. In a television appearance
in late January, the vice president said the GAO had demanded notes
and minutes of the meetings, but GAO officials quickly pointed out
that they were specifically not demanding those documents. (They
had originally asked for notes and minutes last July, but backed
off from the demand in August).
Now, there
is similar questioning of administration claims about what documents
Cheney's office actually has given to the GAO. "We've given
him an awful lot," Cheney said on Fox News January 27. "We've
given him all the financial records, the work that was done by the
agency, all of that's gone to the GAO."
Last week,
in an interview on PBS, vice-presidential counselor Mary Matalin
echoed Cheney's remarks. "We have turned over reams and scores
of documents," Matalin said. "We have given them reams
and reams of documents, so we can only presume that their motivation
for pushing ahead with only Democratic support is politically motivated."
But it appears
that in fact the vice president's office has turned over far less
than "reams and reams" of documents to the GAO. Indeed,
sources familiar with the situation say the vice president's office
has given the GAO 77 pages of financial information, and much of
that is, in the words of one source, "useless on its face."
Although it
has become an issue recently, the fact that the vice president's
office turned over a relatively small amount of information has
been on the public record for months. In a letter sent to Cheney
last August, GAO chief David Walker described what the vice president's
office had provided. "On June 21, [the vice president's] representatives
provided us with 77 pages of miscellaneous documents purporting
to relate to direct and indirect costs incurred in the development
of the National Energy Policy," Walker wrote. "The submission
is incomplete and is not fully responsive."
Specifically,
Walker said that some of the pages contained just a few numbers
with no indication of what the numbers represented. Other pages,
according to Walker, consisted only of diagrams of telephones. Still
others listed charges for moving phones and other equipment, without
indicating for whom the work was done. "It is virtually impossible
to analyze the documentation," Walker wrote. Even if the GAO
were only doing a narrowly financial audit of the energy task force,
sources say, the information provided would be inadequate to do
the job.
Although some
observers have unfairly compared the Cheney task force to Hillary
Rodham Clinton's health-care-task force — Cheney took great
care to comply with a federal open-meetings law that Mrs. Clinton
ignored — the vice president's document production is nevertheless
reminiscent of controversies that arose during the Clinton years.
In the course of several investigations, Clinton White House officials
often claimed that they had given great numbers of documents to
congressional investigating committees, after which investigators
would discover that the documents were either heavily redacted —
some almost entirely blank — or not responsive to the original
request. Now, it appears GAO investigators are facing a similar
situation, with equally frustrating results.
|
