The Cheney Paper Chase
What has the VP given the GAO?

February 7, 2002 10:25 a.m.

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.