WASHINGTON — For the last four years, Vice President Dick Cheney has made the controversial claim that his office is not fully part of the Bush administration in order to exempt it from a presidential order regulating federal agencies' handling of classified national security information, officials said Thursday.
Cheney has held that his office is not fully part of the executive branch of government despite the continued objections of the National Archives, which says his office's failure to demonstrate that it has proper security safeguards in place could jeopardize the government's top secrets.
According to documents released Thursday by a House committee, Cheney's staff has blocked efforts by the National Archives' Information Security Oversight Office to enforce a key component of the presidential order: a mandatory on-site inspection of the vice president's office. At least one of those inspections would have come at a particularly delicate time -- when Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, and other aides were under criminal investigation for their suspected roles in leaking the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame.
In an eight-page letter to Cheney on Thursday, Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles) also charged that Cheney or his top staffers tried to abolish the Information Security Oversight Office this year after its director tried repeatedly to force Cheney's office to comply with the presidential order.
Cheney spokeswoman Lea Anne McBride confirmed the vice president's position Thursday but said she could not discuss the matter in detail, including whether Cheney or his aides tried to abolish the information security office. "We are confident that we are conducting this office properly under the law," McBride said.
Some legal scholars and government secrecy experts noted the irony in Cheney's stance that his office is not fully part of the executive branch, given his claims of executive privilege when refusing to provide information requested by Congress.
Cheney's office has also refused to file required reports with the National Archives elaborating how much national security information was being classified and declassified, which was first reported by the Chicago Tribune last year.
Documents released Thursday offer new details about the intensifying dispute between the office of the vice president and the National Archives. The archives has appealed to Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales to intervene but has not received a response.
