WASHINGTON — In the latest legal challenge to the secrecy surrounding Vice President Dick Cheney's energy task force, a federal judge Thursday ordered the Bush administration to release thousands of pages of records on the panel's deliberations.
U.S. District Judge Paul L. Friedman ruled that the "agency records" kept at the Energy and Interior departments fall outside the secrecy shield surrounding the president and vice president. Therefore, they must be disclosed to the public under the Freedom of Information Act.
The judge gave the agencies until June 1 to examine their files and release documents that detail the workings of Cheney's energy task force.
"This is a real affirmation of the public's right to know how its government is operating," said Sharon Buccino, a lawyer for the Natural Resources Defense Council. "Once Congress and the American people get the details about what happened at the task force's closed-door meetings, the administration's energy plan will be revealed for what it is -- a payback to corporate polluters."
The Natural Resources Defense Council's case is one of three separate legal efforts to pry loose information on Cheney's task force, which drew up an energy policy in the first months of the Bush administration. Environmentalists complained that Cheney and his team met behind closed doors with lobbyists from the oil, coal, gas and nuclear industries.
Cheney's energy plan was published three years ago, and the administration has been fighting lawsuits since that seek information on how it was produced.
The General Accounting Office, the research arm of Congress, filed its first-ever lawsuit against the White House, seeking information on who met with Cheney. However, after a federal judge ruled against the GAO, the agency dropped the claim.
Two other suits have moved forward, and one of them is now before the Supreme Court.
In one of the suits, the Sierra Club, a liberal environmental group, and Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group, contend that Cheney violated an open-government measure, the Federal Advisory Committee Act. The law generally requires agency officials to meet in public when they are seeking outside advice.
Based on that claim, a federal judge ordered Cheney's office to turn over documents on who met with his task force. The administration refused to comply with that order, and after losing in a federal appeals court, it asked the Supreme Court to take up the case of "in re Richard B. Cheney." The high court will hear that case on April 27.
