Dean Records May Remain Sealed
Addressing Criticism from GOP, He Says Decision Is Complicated
By Dan Balz and Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, December 3, 2003; Page A04
NEWTON, Iowa, Dec. 1 -- Howard Dean, facing criticism for going to unusual lengths to seal records of his governorship of Vermont, said Tuesday that he is unlikely to make a quick decision about whether to seek to open them before next year's election.
"We're talking about trying to be accommodating," the Democratic presidential candidate told reporters. "We have no commitment to do anything other than what we've done right now."
Dean negotiated a 10-year seal on many of the official papers from his 12-year governorship when he left office in January 2002. The seal lasts four years longer than that imposed by previous governors.
Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie traveled to Dean's home state Tuesday and charged that Dean's handling of the flap was another example of Dean statements that were "completely at odds with all facts."
"As everyone in this room surely knows, your former governor would never say one thing and do another," Gillespie said in prepared remarks for the state GOP's $125-a-ticket fall dinner, in Essex Junction.
After Newsweek reported the seal this week, Dean said Monday on ABC's "Good Morning America" that President Bush had done much the same thing by depositing the records of his Texas governorship in his father's presidential library.
"I'll unseal mine if he'll unseal all of his," Dean said.
All 2,100 boxes of Bush's statehouse records were moved from the presidential library to the Texas State Library and Archives Commission in July 2002, according to a state archivist. Two months earlier, a Texas attorney general's opinion had established that they were subject to the state's open-records law.
Gillespie said records of Bush's governorship "are available to the public . . . with limited exceptions."
"I'm sure that when Dr. Dean learns that President Bush's public papers as governor are now unsealed, he will be good to his word and unseal the papers of his governorship as well," Gillespie said.
Gillespie's statement came as Dean campaign officials scrambled to decide whether to take action to address the controversy, and as he offered contradictory statements about his intentions, saying at one point that "transparency is important" but adding that "executive privilege is a serious issue."
Dean said Tuesday that the rules covering Bush's records "might be" acceptable to him and added that he had asked his staff and the lawyer who negotiated the deal to seal the records to explore his options but said that the issue was too complicated to be decided immediately.
He worked out the deal to have his records sealed for 10 years as he was leaving office. Dean said he had asked the lawyer, David Rocchio, to try to have them sealed "as long as possible," claiming that was in line with other governors he knows.
Dean told Vermont Public Radio shortly after he negotiated the deal that he wanted the records sealed to avoid embarrassing stories during his presidential campaign. On Tuesday, Dean dismissed that comment as "a smarty remark" and said, "I wasn't really being very serious about it."
Another Democratic presidential candidate, Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (Conn.), criticized Dean's decision in a statement Monday. "Howard Dean likes to present himself as a straight talker," Lieberman said. "But he took an extra long walk from straight talk when he sealed his records as governor and recalled his letters from state agencies just to avoid potential political embarrassment."
With Gillespie headed to Vermont, Dean said his campaign considered issuing a statement condemning the GOP chairman but decided to refrain. "We thought we were going to take a whack at him but we're not going to take a whack at him," he said.
Asked his view of the party leader's trip to Vermont, Dean said: "We're delighted that he's making it an issue. Obviously it belies the notion that they're very interested in having us oppose Bush." |
