GAO Goes to Court to Get Cheney Data

The clash between a congressional watchdog agency and the White House escalated Friday, as lawyers for the General Accounting Office sought a court order that would force Vice President Dick Cheney to reveal with whom he met as the administration formed its national energy plan.

In its first lawsuit against the executive branch, the GAO said it has a legal right to know who attended meetings of Cheney’s National Energy Policy Development Group.

Congress created the GAO in 1921 as an auditing unit, and its law “broadly authorizes GAO to investigate all matters relating to the use of public funds,” David M. Walker, the comptroller general, said in his lawsuit.

That includes the authority to examine not just how money was spent but also how government officials made official policy, the lawsuit argues.

In May, Cheney balked at the rather routine document request from Walker’s agency and said it threatened “to intrude into the heart of executive deliberations.”

President Bush and his advisors were determined to erect a legal barrier around the White House, in contrast to the Clinton era, when investigators succeeded in prying secrets from the administration.

Bush and Cheney chose to draw a line against the GAO probe, although they did so when the now-failed Enron Corp. was a high-flying energy trader based in Houston.

This year, Enron’s spectacular collapse has raised the political stakes in the case of Walker vs. Cheney. It puts an even brighter spotlight on the administration’s close ties to Texas energy executives, including top Enron officials.

“We take this step reluctantly,” Walker said in filing the lawsuit. “Nevertheless, given GAO’s responsibility to Congress and the American people, we have no other choice.”

Rep. Henry A. Waxman, the Los Angeles Democrat who first sought the information along with Rep. John D. Dingell (D-Mich.), called the legal action a “remarkable and sad” development.

“The American people and Congress have an obvious right to know which lobbyists and special interests tried to influence the vice president’s energy policy,” Waxman said.

The White House, which has acknowledged that Cheney or members of the task force met six times last year with representatives of Enron, said it will vigorously fight the legal battle. If necessary, administration officials said, they will invoke “executive privilege,” the doctrine that was discredited by the Nixon administration during the Watergate scandal of the 1970s.

“We expected this [lawsuit], and we are ready to defend our principles in court,” White House spokeswoman Anne Womack said. “This goes to the heart of the presidency and to the ability of the president and vice president to receive candid, discreet advice.”

White House lawyers contend that the GAO is going beyond its legal authority. While the accounting office can examine how agencies spend their money, the White House is not an “agency,” they say, and Cheney’s task force was not spending money.

Beyond that, the White House lawyers argue, Waxman and Dingell do not represent Congress or even a congressional committee. As Democrats, they are in the minority in the House of Representatives and therefore do not speak for the body as a whole, the attorneys say.

They will urge a federal judge to reject the GAO’s claim on these narrow grounds. If those arguments fail, the administration is prepared to raise the stakes by claiming that the Constitution shields the president from congressional meddling.

U.S. Solicitor General Theodore B. Olson has been tapped to head the White House defense.

Because Olson argues regularly before the Supreme Court, his appointment signals that the administration is determined to fight the battle all the way through the legal system. He has a month to file a response to the GAO’s suit in a federal district court in Washington.

“This is just one chapter in the larger effort by the Bush administration to reassert the prerogatives of the presidency,” said Duke University law professor Christopher Schroeder, who served as a Justice Department legal advisor during the Clinton administration. “Usually these disputes get hashed out at a much lower level, but this administration is saying, ‘We’re going to stand on principle and not yield.’ ”

The administration took that stance last summer. “But that was before Enron,” Schroeder said, questioning whether the make-up of the energy task force is the best test case for a legal fight.

In a separate lawsuit, Larry Klayman, who heads the private watchdog group Judicial Watch, has asked U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan to order Cheney to reveal information about his task force on the grounds that it is a federal advisory committee. Congress has said these official advisory panels must disclose who participates.

“We support what they did, but our lawsuit was brought under a law the Supreme Court has already said is constitutional,” Klayman said.

And Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.), who chairs the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, is considering seeking information on Cheney’s task force directly through his panel. His request could sidestep the administration’s claim that Waxman does not speak for a congressional committee and the GAO does not speak for Congress.

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Times staff writers Ronald Brownstein and Doyle McManus contributed to this report.

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