David Walker is getting ready to do just that. The GAO chief, who now says he will sue to get the documents, insists he wasn’t looking for a showdown with Cheney. Last summer two House Democrats asked the GAO to probe whether the energy task force was unfairly influenced by industry lobbyists. Walker complied, sending the White House a sharply worded “demand letter” requesting all notes and minutes of its meetings.
A plain-spoken Republican who worked in Ronald Reagan’s Labor Department and later as an Arthur Andersen executive, Walker tells NEWSWEEK he concluded that the demands were too intrusive. “Out of respect for the vice president,” Walker says, he “personally” scaled back the request, asking only for a list of people who advised the task force and the topics of their conversations. But Cheney still refused. Then Enron collapsed late last year, and Walker’s cause suddenly became a whole lot more interesting. “This all got Enronized,” says one administration aide with a sigh. Walker, who has hired a Washington law firm to handle the case, says his investigation “isn’t an Enron issue.” Congress, he says, “has the right to know who from the outside is seeking to influence” White House policy. “I’m not seeking a confrontation. We just need the information.”
As the trash talk between the two sides escalates–“Talk is cheap,” Walker sneers at Cheney’s chin-out attitude–the case has become in part a classic Washington showdown between two powerful, bullheaded men. Yet the feud frames a wider clash between two worlds: a White House with an instinct for secrecy and Washington’s Axis of Inquiry–lawyers, journalists, courts and congressional investigators. That clash will only intensify in the coming days, as former Enron CEO Ken Lay heads for the Hill and the Justice Department proceeds with its criminal probe of the troubled energy company.
The White House has hung tough, but the administration made a limited tactical retreat as pressure increased to fully disclose its ties to Enron. Cheney acknowledged that he had personally discussed energy policy in a March 2001 meeting with Lay–and officials admitted that there were five other meetings between Enron representatives and Cheney’s staff. In fact, there was at least one more. NEWSWEEK has learned that on March 29 of last year, Cheney’s top energy aide, Andrew Lundquist, met with members of the Clean Power Group–a coalition funded by five power companies that included Enron. The group wanted the task force to replace some environmental rules with a plan that would allow industries to trade “pollution credits” among themselves. Enron stood to make hundreds of millions of dollars if the plan was adopted.
The meeting was arranged by Brad Card, the Clean Power Group’s outside lobbyist and brother of White House chief of staff Andrew Card. So why didn’t the White House disclose the meeting in its list of Enron contacts? A White House aide says Lundquist “has no recollection” of being told that Enron was part of the group. (Brad Card’s associate Mark Irion tells NEWSWEEK he made clear to Lundquist at the outset that Enron was a member.) Cheney spokeswoman Mary Matalin says it doesn’t matter, since the proposal never made it into the energy plan. “Who cares if there were a hundred meetings?” she says. The Justice Department might. On Friday, Justice officials ordered the administration to preserve all documents related “in any way” to Enron.
Democrats, and even some Republicans, on the Hill are standing shoulder to shoulder with Walker’s demands for still more disclosure. Their argument: when the White House or government agencies make policy, they are supposed to use a procedure that guarantees public access to keep officials from being secretly influenced by private–so-called ex parte–conversations.
The White House insists that all meetings of the task force are exempt from this kind of disclosure. Why? Because Cheney–a “constitutional officer” as vice president–is exempt, and therefore, they say, so is the task force he ran. White House aides say they designed the task force to avoid the problems that Hillary Clinton’s health-care group faced in 1994. To insulate the group within constitutional limits, aides say, Cheney himself chaired it, only government officials served on it and only task-force members–not the whole group–met with industry lobbyists. Critics complain that’s a loophole big enough to drive an oil rig through.
Bush and Cheney are unimpressed. For years Cheney has loudly lamented the steady erosion of presidential power at the hands of Congress and the press. And Bush is the son of a CIA director and a third-generation Skull and Bones man: a kid to secrets born. The Cheney-Bush kinship has been strengthened by the war on terror, with its emphasis on sealed lips. “It’s a horse race between them,” says a top White House aide, “to see who can take a tougher stand.”
The president’s political advisers aren’t nearly so confident. For months GOP strategists have been urging the White House to ease up or risk looking as if it has something to hide. “If we released everything, we would look better,” admits one Bush aide. But in his increasingly tense stare-down with Walker, Cheney isn’t about to be the one who blinks first.
