U.S. Lawyers Admit Not Fully Reviewing Cheney Documents

By: John Heilprin

Government lawyers admitted yesterday they hadn't completely reviewed documents from Vice President Dick Cheney's energy task force, despite claiming that the documents "all involve sensitive communications between and among the President and his closest advisers" that should be kept secret.

U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan ordered task force documents to be made public by Nov. 5 and said he was shocked the Justice Department lawyers had not examined all the documents after asserting for more than a year that each of them involved confidential information.

"That is a startling revelation", Sullivan said, after rejecting the Bush administration's claim that he lacks authority to order the release of the task force papers.

The judge directed the lawyers to either produce the documents or supply a list of each one being withheld and an explanation of why it is deemed sensitive.

"It's like everyone else has to do", Sullivan said in explaining why the task force should have to provide papers on its inner workings. Sullivan said his intent was "to carve out a middle ground because obviously the battle lines have been drawn".

The judge said he wanted the documents or the list by Nov. 5, Election Day, but gave the government an opportunity to first file objections. He set another hearing for Oct. 31, but acknowledged a federal appeals court may end up deciding the issue.

Shannen W. Coffin, a deputy assistant attorney general, said that White House lawyers "haven't completed a document review" and that "we're not going to ask our clients to complete the review" because doing so would be "too burdensome".

Sharply questioned by the judge, Coffin tried several times to explain himself more fully, then said he had misspoken.

"We have done a review. We haven't completed it", he said finally. "We haven't done everything necessary for a [document] production."

In court papers the Justice Department handed out at yesterday's hearing, the government asserts the task force documents involve "sensitive deliberations at the highest levels of the executive branch, including presumptively privileged presidential communications".

The government argues in a Sept. 3 memo that those documents "are all presumptively privileged because they all involve sensitive communications between and among the President and his closest advisers", and said that turning them over would "raise separation-of-powers concerns".

Judicial Watch, a conservative-leaning legal rights organization, and environmentalists have sued for the documents, as has the General Accounting Office, a congressional investigative agency.

They argue, in several separate federal court cases, the public has a right to learn the details of any industry influence on the national energy plan that Cheney's task force put together more than a year ago.