Group Accuses White House of Obstructing Suit
By Adam Entous
Fri Jul 26, 5:50 PM ET
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A public interest group on Friday accused the White House of preventing a courier from serving Vice President Dick Cheney ( news - web sites) with a lawsuit accusing him and the company he ran, Halliburton Co., of defrauding shareholders by overstating company revenues.
Judicial Watch said its process server went the White House on July 22 to deliver the lawsuit to the vice president, who was chief executive of Halliburton from 1995 to 2000. But the group said the courier was turned away by the Secret Service ( news - web sites) and allegedly threatened with arrest.
"We have served many a lawsuit on Bill Clinton, Al Gore ( news - web sites), and Hillary Clinton ( news - web sites) when they were in the White House ... Never before have our process servers been threatened with arrest," said Larry Klayman, who serves as chairman and general counsel of the 8-year-old legal foundation that has filed a number of highly publicized lawsuits against government officials.
Cheney adviser Mary Matalin dismissed the claims as a public relations stunt and said the lawsuit should have been served on Cheney's private attorney.
Secret Service spokesman Marc Connolly said the courier did not have clearance to visit Cheney's office and that officers were not authorized to accept the papers on his behalf.
"He (the courier) was allowed use of a phone by our uniform division officer in order to try to obtain a point of contact (authorization). He was unsuccessful," Connolly said.
Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, said the courier was rebuffed when he called the vice president's office for clearance. Fitton dismissed suggestions that Cheney's private attorney should have been served. "You don't serve lawsuits on lawyers, you serve them on defendants," he said.
The Judicial Watch lawsuit alleges that Cheney conspired with others to file false financial statements that misled investors. The company overstated revenues by as much as $445 million over three years, it said.
The Securities and Exchange Commission ( news - web sites) is investigating how the company accounted for cost overruns on construction jobs.
Halliburton and the White House dismissed the Judicial Watch lawsuit as lacking merit. The company said it applied accounting rules correctly and is cooperating fully with the SEC. Earlier this month, Bush said he was confident the federal probe of Halliburton would show Cheney did nothing wrong.
Democrats have seized on Cheney's tenure at Halliburton and Bush's record as a Texas businessman to paint the Republican administration as compromised by insider deals and close business connections.
With polls showing his public standing threatened for the first time since the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush has embraced legislation that would increase oversight of auditors and impose tougher penalties for corporate misconduct.
"If this Bush-Cheney White House is serious about corporate corruption and responsibility, it would not allow the vice president to improperly hide behind White House security to evade service of process in the Halliburton securities fraud litigation, and it would not threaten the process server with arrest," Klayman said.
He said Judicial Watch would continue to try to serve Cheney with the lawsuit. If he refused to accept it, the group threatened to ask the court to impose sanctions. "Mr. Cheney is not above the law," Judicial Watch said. |
