Legal News

Judge to Veep Cheney: Preserve Those Papers

By Dan Slater

Dick Cheney waves upon arrival in Kiev, Ukraine, Thursday, Sept. 4, 2008. (AP Photo/Sergei Chuzavkov)

Thanks to a court battle pursued by a Washington organization, Dick Cheney must cough up his veep papers.

A couple weeks ago, CREW, or the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, along with two historians and three organizations of historians and archivists, sued Cheney, the Office of the Vice President, the archivist and the National Archives and Records Administration, challenging their exclusion of a majority of Cheney’s papers from the Presidential Records Act. Click here for the Law Blog post, and here for the report on CREW’s Web site, where you’ll find a link to the suit.

On Saturday, U.S. District Judge Collee Kollar-Kotelly ordered Cheney to preserve a wide range of the records from his time as vice president. The decision, reports the AP, is a setback for the Bush administration in its effort to promote a narrow definition of materials that must be safeguarded under by the Presidential Records Act. The Bush administration’s legal position “heightens the court’s concern” that some records may not be preserved, said the judge.

The suit stems from Cheney’s position that his office is not part of the executive branch of government. Cheney’s office claims that the office of the vice president follows the PRA and will continue to follow the requirements of the law. He said that includes turning over vice presidential records to the National Archives at the end of the term. This summer, however, Cheney chief of staff David Addington told Congress the vice president belongs to neither the executive nor legislative branch of government, but rather is attached by the Constitution to Congress.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on September 22, 2008 (boomark / email).