Release of Energy Records Ordered

In the latest legal challenge to the secrecy surrounding Vice President Dick Cheney’s energy task force, a federal judge Thursday ordered the Bush administration to release thousands of pages of records on the panel’s deliberations.

U.S. District Judge Paul L. Friedman ruled that the “agency records” kept at the Energy and Interior departments fall outside the secrecy shield surrounding the president and vice president. Therefore, they must be disclosed to the public under the Freedom of Information Act.

The judge gave the agencies until June 1 to examine their files and release documents that detail the workings of Cheney’s energy task force.

“This is a real affirmation of the public’s right to know how its government is operating,” said Sharon Buccino, a lawyer for the Natural Resources Defense Council. “Once Congress and the American people get the details about what happened at the task force’s closed-door meetings, the administration’s energy plan will be revealed for what it is -- a payback to corporate polluters.”

The Natural Resources Defense Council’s case is one of three separate legal efforts to pry loose information on Cheney’s task force, which drew up an energy policy in the first months of the Bush administration. Environmentalists complained that Cheney and his team met behind closed doors with lobbyists from the oil, coal, gas and nuclear industries.

Cheney’s energy plan was published three years ago, and the administration has been fighting lawsuits since that seek information on how it was produced.

The General Accounting Office, the research arm of Congress, filed its first-ever lawsuit against the White House, seeking information on who met with Cheney. However, after a federal judge ruled against the GAO, the agency dropped the claim.

Two other suits have moved forward, and one of them is now before the Supreme Court.

In one of the suits, the Sierra Club, a liberal environmental group, and Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group, contend that Cheney violated an open-government measure, the Federal Advisory Committee Act. The law generally requires agency officials to meet in public when they are seeking outside advice.

Based on that claim, a federal judge ordered Cheney’s office to turn over documents on who met with his task force. The administration refused to comply with that order, and after losing in a federal appeals court, it asked the Supreme Court to take up the case of “in re Richard B. Cheney.” The high court will hear that case on April 27.

In its defense of the vice president, administration lawyers said it would violate the Constitution’s separation of powers doctrine to have a judge force the president or vice president to reveal who they met with in private.

The third case involves the Natural Resources Defense Council and Judicial Watch, and it turns on the Freedom of Information Act of 1974. Its “fundamental purpose is to assist citizens in discovering what their government is up to,” Friedman wrote. The two groups have asked for records describing who met with top government officials and what recommendations were made.

The 1974 law does not extend to the White House or the vice president’s office. But the judge said that since Energy and Interior Department officials helped run Cheney’s task force, the outside groups were entitled to see the records held by those agencies.

It is not clear what will happen next. Administration lawyers could ask the U.S. appeals court to put the judge’s decision on hold until after the Supreme Court decides the pending Cheney case.

Justice Department spokeswoman Monica Goodling said the administration has made the energy policy plan available for anyone to read. Moreover, the government has released 36,000 pages of documents in response to earlier legal claims.

“To allow further discovery into the advice provided by the president’s closest advisors would upset the ability of the president and the vice president to effectively develop strong national policy,” Goodling said.