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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: John Carragher who wrote (450740)	8/30/2003 7:57:27 PM
From: GST	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769667

GOP threats halted GAO Cheney suit By Peter Brand and Alexander Bolton Threats by Republicans to cut the General Accounting Office (GAO) budget influenced its decision to abandon a lawsuit against Vice President Dick Cheney, The Hill has learned. Sources familiar with high-level discussions at the GAO said Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), chairman of the Appropriations Committee, met with GAO Comptroller General David Walker earlier this year and “unambiguously” pressured him to drop the suit or face cuts in his $440 million budget. Walker yesterday acknowledged meeting Stevens, but denied the senator threatened to cut funding for the investigative agency. However, he confirmed that such threats were made, although he said they came from a lawmaker not “in a position to deliver” on them and did not occur recently. PATRICK RYAN Vice President Dick Cheney -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The decision to drop the lawsuit has raised concerns that Congress’s all-purpose auditor has sacrificed its traditional role as an independent arm of Congress. “ I met with Stevens in his capacity of president pro tempore,” the comptroller said: “In the conversation with Sen. Stevens there was no assertion or inference [of funding cuts]. He didn’t even raise the issue of appropriations.” Walker did say, however, that several lawmakers have threatened in the past year to cut agency funding if it persisted with the controversial lawsuit. He also said the budget threat was among a number of factors that tipped his Feb. 7 decision to halt litigation. A GAO staff member and several Stevens’s aides attended the meeting. Stevens’s offices were closed at press time and neither the senator nor his spokeswoman could be reached for comment. The controversy with Cheney came to a head in December after U.S. District Court Judge John Bates, citing separation of powers, ruled that Walker lacked sufficient grounds to compel Cheney to disclose the records of a White House energy task force that he had headed. Walker had filed the suit against Cheney in February 2002 at the request of House Democrats. This was the first time in its 81-year history that the GAO, acting in its capacity as the investigative arm of Congress, sued the executive branch to obtain withheld information.

To: John Carragher who wrote (450740)	8/30/2003 8:16:13 PM
From: GST	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 769667

GAO: Cheney Hindered Probe WASHINGTON, Aug. 26, 2003 The Cheney energy plan called for expanded oil and gas drilling on public land and easing regulatory barriers to building nuclear power plants. (AP) Congressional investigators say they were unable to determine how much the White House's energy policy was influenced by the oil industry because they were denied documents by Vice President Dick Cheney about his energy task force. Investigators also came up short trying to find out how much money various agencies spent on creating the national energy policy, a General Accounting Office report released Monday said. The unwillingness of Cheney's office to turn over records and other information "precluded us from fully achieving our objectives" and limited its analysis, the GAO said. The GAO unsuccessfully sued the vice president last year to release information. The Energy and Interior departments and the Environmental Protection Agency reviewed the GAO's report before it was released and chose not to comment. The vice president's office declined to look at it, the GAO said. The National Energy Policy Development Group, chaired by Cheney, was formed by President Bush in January 2001 to develop a national energy policy. The task force submitted its final report in May 2001. Congress is now considering the energy-related legislative proposals. The GAO said the task force's report was the "product of a centralized, topdown, short-term, and labor-intensive process that involved the efforts of several hundred federal employees government wide." In the few months between the start of the energy task force and its presentation of the final report, the vice president, some Cabinet-level and other senior administration officials and support staff controlled most of the report's development, according to the GAO. They met frequently with energy industry representatives and only on a limited basis with scholars and environmentalists, the GAO said. The extent to which any of these meetings or information obtained from the energy industry influenced policy can't be determined, based on limited information made available to the GAO, the report said. Two Democratic presidential candidates, Sens. John Kerry of Massachusetts and Bob Graham of Florida, on Tuesday criticized the administration for failing to release the energy task force documents and called on Cheney to produce the records. "As gas prices reach historic levels and the nation's energy infrastructure is pushed beyond its limits, the Bush administration has decided their energy policy will be of the special interests, by the special interests and for the special interests," Kerry said in a statement. Said Graham: "If the Bush-Cheney team has nothing to hide, then why are they hiding documents? There can be only one answer — they don't want the American people to know just how much influence the big oil companies have over U.S. energy policy." Last December, a federal judge rebuffed congressional efforts to gather information about meetings that Cheney's energy task force held with industry executives and lobbyists while formulating the administration's energy plan. The judge said the lawsuit filed by Comptroller General David Walker against the vice president was an unprecedented act that raised serious separation-of-powers issues between the executive and legislative branches of government. The comptroller general runs the GAO. Some Democratic congressmen requested information in the spring of 2001 about which industry executives and lobbyists the Cheney task force was meeting with in creating the Bush administration's energy plan. The Cheney energy plan called for expanded oil and gas drilling on public land and easing regulatory barriers to building nuclear power plants. Among the proposals: drilling in the Arctic wildlife refuge and possibly reviving nuclear fuel reprocessing, which was abandoned in the 1970s as a nuclear proliferation threat. ©MMIII, The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. cbsnews.com