Non Executive Entity Cheney To Assert Executive Privilege

Non Executive Entity Cheney To Assert Executive Privilege
Maintains he does not belong to Executive branch but will still abuse it's perks to escape oversight
Steve Watson
Infowars.net
Thursday, July 19, 2007

[align=left] Three weeks ago it was revealed that for the past four years Dick Cheney's office has declared itself above the law by claiming it was not part of the executive branch, despite continuing to receive funding from the bill that funds the executive branch. Now letters out of Cheney's office indicate that it is to attempt to make an independent assertion of executive privilege, contradicting its previous statements and seemingly just making up the law as it goes along.
The implication was contained within a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee in relation to an extension, which has been granted, to comply with a subpoena on documents related to the NSA domestic spying program.
As reported by Raw Story today:[/align]

[align=left] Counsel to the Vice President Shannen Coffin appeared to imply that Cheney's office may assert executive privilege after it finishes reviewing documents that are responsive to the committee's subpoena. The documents are due today.
"While the Office of the Vice President reserves legal protections that apply in this matter, we look forward to working to meet the Committee's needs for information and on legislative matters to protect the Nation," Coffin wrote.
[/align]

So Cheney's office is maintaining that it is not part of the executive branch, yet now it is going to continue to invoke executive privilege. Which is it to be?
Cheney has come under fire previously for abusing executive privilege and it is now clear that his office considers it to be merely a tool to avoid oversight and accountability.
Furthermore, as Michael C. Dorf, Vice Dean and Professor of Law at Columbia University, has asserted:

Nor is it clear... that the Vice President can assert executive privilege. The Constitution vests the Executive Power in the President. So long as the President remains healthy, the Vice President has no constitutionally assigned executive function. As far as the Constitution is concerned, the Vice President's role is legislative in nature: to preside over and break ties in the Senate.

The documents released three weeks ago by the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform revealed that Cheney's office has not cooperated with an office at the National Archives and Records Administration which is responsible for overseeing the protection of classified material by the executive branch.
Clearly the reason Cheney's office continued to declare itself autonomous, also attempting to abolish agencies it is supposed to be accountable to, was the fact that a key component of the presidential order Cheney's office was defying included mandatory on-site inspections. At least one of those inspections would have come at a particularly delicate time â?? 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.
Libby's trial has brought Cheney's role to center stage. According to evidence and testimony, Cheney selectively leaked and declassified intelligence information to bolster the administration's case for war and later to defend against charges that he had misrepresented prewar intelligence.
Even former Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Bob Graham has stated:
"It's hard to believe that the chief of staff to the vice president was acting as a rogue agent. What we have learned from the trial validates the suspicion that Libby was not just operating as a lone ranger. He was carrying out what the vice president wanted him to do, which was to besmirch Joe Wilson. I think Libby has been a conspirator in one of the most reprehensible and damaging breaches of American security in modern history."
Back in March a spokesman for the jury that convicted Libby told reporters immediately afterward that many felt sympathy for him and believed he was only the "fall guy."
Denis Collins said they believed that Vice President Cheney did "task him to talk to reporters" and out Valerie Plame as a CIA agent.
However this will all seemingly go down the memory hole. Libby will now skip jail and Cheney himself will face no recrimination, not even a cursory investigation.



We have been reminded time and time again by the criminals in office that they consider themselves subject to no law or oversight.
Dick Cheney has previously declared both himself and President Bush unaccountable to Congress, stating last year that "vice president and president and constitutional officers donâ??t appear before the Congress.â?�
It is also now clear that Bush and Cheney have broken literally hundreds of laws because they see themselves as outside of their reach.
The Constitution assigns power to Congress to write the laws and asserts that the president has an obligation ''to take care that the laws be faithfully executed." Bush, however, has repeatedly declared that he does not need to ''execute" a law he believes is unconstitutional.
Bush and Cheney are vastly expanding Presidential power and creating provisions that set their offices up as dictatorial bodies. Two months ago new legislation was signed which declares that in the event of a "catastrophic event", the President can take total control over the government and the country, bypassing all other levels of government at the state, federal, local, territorial and tribal levels, and thus ensuring total unprecedented dictatorial power.
The National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive, which also places the Secretary of Homeland Security in charge of domestic "security", was signed on May 9th without the approval or oversight of Congress and seemingly supercedes the National Emergency Act which allows the president to declare a national emergency but also requires that Congress have the authority to "modify, rescind, or render dormant" such emergency authority if it believes the president has acted inappropriately.
It has now become chillingly clear that the President and the Vice President believe that they have absolute power over the Government of the United States and cannot be held accountable to anybody.

[align=left] Expanding claim of executive authority, White House official tells paper staff can't be charged
John Byrne
Raw Story
Friday, July 20, 2007[/align]
A senior Bush Administration official unveiled a new strategy in Friday's Washington Post -- anonymously -- to combat Democrats in Congress who are clamoring to file contempt charges against officials who refuse to talk about the firings of nine US prosecutors.
In sum, this strategy amounts to, "once we say no, we can't be charged."
Ironically, President Bush's new legal argument hinges on whether one of his own US prosecutors can file charges against his staff.
According to the Post, "Administration officials argued yesterday that Congress has no power to force a U.S. attorney to pursue contempt charges in cases, such as the prosecutor firings, in which the president has declared that testimony or documents are protected from release by executive privilege. Officials pointed to a Justice Department legal opinion during the Reagan administration, which made the same argument in a case that was never resolved by the courts."
"A U.S. attorney would not be permitted to bring contempt charges or convene a grand jury in an executive privilege case," a senior official told the Post, which granted the official anonymity because 'he was not authorized to discuss the issue publicly.' "And a U.S. attorney wouldn't be permitted to argue against the reasoned legal opinion that the Justice Department provided. No one should expect that to happen."
Under law, a contempt citation by the House or Senate must be submitted to Washington, D.C. US attorney, who then brings the charge to a grand jury.
"It has long been understood that, in circumstances like these, the constitutional prerogatives of the president would make it a futile and purely political act for Congress to refer contempt citations to U.S. attorneys," the anonymous Bush official added.
George Mason University professor of public policy Mark J. Rozell called the administration's stance "astonishing" in the article.
"That's a breathtakingly broad view of the president's role in this system of separation of powers," Rozell told the reporter. "What this statement is saying is the president's claim of executive privilege trumps all."
The White House did not inform Democrats of the plan, which the Post called a "bold new assertion of executive authority."
Reached for comment, Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) told the paper it was "an outrageous abuse of executive privilege" and said: "The White House must stop stonewalling and start being accountable to Congress and the American people. No one, including the president, is above the law."
Read the full article here.

Government agency says Bush overreaches on executive privilege [align=left] Michael Roston
Raw Story
Friday, July 20, 2007[/align]
A report earlier this month by the Congressional Research Service, a nonpartisan agency that studies policy and legal questions for Members of Congress, found that President George W. Bush's recent assertions of 'executive privilege' to fend off Congressional investigators were dubious.
Morton Rosenberg, a Specialist in American Public Law at CRS, said that the assertion of privilege recently attempted by the White House went beyond restraints found in recent legal decisions.
"[R]ecent appellate court rulings cast considerable doubt on the broad claims of privilege posited by [the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel] in the past and now by the Clement Memo," Rosenberg wrote in the July 5 report.
'The Clement memo' refers to a document published by the White House and written by Paul Clement, the Solicitor General at the Justice Department, who must serve as 'acting Attorney General' for all matters dealing with the US Attorneys controversy.
Rosenberg wrote that a pair of Clinton-era federal court rulings, the so-called Espy and Judicial Watch cases, "arguably have effected important qualifications and restraints on the nature, scope and reach of the presidential communications privilege."
For instance, he wrote that "the unavailability of the information elsewhere by an appropriate investigating authority" could overcome an assertion of executive privilege.
In related news, the Washington Post's Dan Eggen and Amy Goldstein provided details of a White House legal strategy that would expand the scope of executive privilege. They write that the Justice Department will effectively order the US Attorney for the District of Columbia to decline to file any criminal contempt charges against current and former White House officials who refuse to comply with subpoenas based on an assertion of executive privilege.
The CRS report, which like all of the agency's publications has not been made publicly available, can be downloaded from the Federation of American Scientists' Project on Government Secrecy.