GAO vs. Cheney: Coming Soon
The vice president takes the battle to The Tonight Show.

February 20, 2002 12:55 p.m.

arring some unexpected last-minute development, it now appears that the General Accounting Office will file suit within days against Vice President Dick Cheney in the dispute over information concerning outsiders who were consulted by Cheney's energy task force. And as the clock ticks down, there are new concerns that Cheney has again misrepresented one of the core issues in the controversy.

The GAO and the vice president have been engaged in a running argument about whether the GAO's demand for information includes a demand for notes and minutes of task-force meetings with outsiders. In a television appearance in late January, the vice president said the GAO, acting at the behest of Bush administration antagonist Rep. Henry Waxman, had indeed demanded notes and minutes of the meetings. Calling Cheney's statement a "critical and highly material misrepresentation" of the facts in the case, 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).

GAO General Counsel Anthony Gamboa reiterated the GAO's position yesterday in a letter to the editor of the Wall Street Journal. "The GAO long ago dropped its request for the minutes and notes of the vice president's meetings with people outside the government, as well as requests for any materials those individuals have given to Mr. Cheney," Gamboa wrote. "The GAO simply seeks the names of those he met in his capacity as head of the energy policy task force, when and where he met them, the subject matter of the meetings, and an explanation of the costs incurred."

But last night, appearing on The Tonight Show, Cheney repeated his charge. "What's at stake here is whether a member of Congress [Waxman] can demand that I give him notes of all my meetings and a list of everybody I met with," Cheney told host Jay Leno. "We don't think that he has that authority."

It is not clear exactly what strategy Cheney is pursuing in his public statements about the case. In highly publicized forums, he has claimed that the GAO is demanding notes of the task force meetings. But the evidence seems to support the GAO's position that it is not making that demand. While Cheney's statements may elicit public approval — they drew enthusiastic applause on The Tonight Show — the vice president might face a more critical audience in court, where a judge would be able to examine correspondence between the GAO and Cheney's office over the nature of the GAO's demands. A key piece of evidence will be an August 17, 2001 letter to Cheney from GAO chief David Walker, in which Walker wrote:

In communications with the vice president's counsel...we offered to eliminate our earlier request for minutes and notes and for the information presented by members of the public. Even though we are legally entitled to this information, as a matter of comity, we are scaling back the records we are requesting to exclude these two items of information.

The letter seems clear enough, yet Cheney continues to say that the GAO is demanding "notes of all my meetings." At this point, it appears that neither side is in any mood to back down, so the conflict will most likely not be resolved until it is argued in court.