Obama's Justice Department Seeks Embarrassment Exception For Cheney

Obama’s Justice Department seeks embarrassment exception for Cheney

http://rawstory.com/08/news/2009/07/...on-for-cheney/

(Gold9472: Obama is all kinds of criminal.)

By Stephen C. Webster
Published: July 21, 2009

President Barack Obama’s Justice Department is being very generous to former Vice President Dick Cheney, who has emerged a fierce critic of the current administration.

Arguing before Washington, D.C. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan, Justice Department lawyer Jeffrey Smith said Tuesday that the court should not unseal Cheney’s interview with prosecutors during the Valerie Plame case because it could make future vice presidents hesitant to cooperate with investigations. He added that Cheney’s words could also be used for political embarrassment and must be kept under wraps until it can only be used in a “historical context.”

Smith has previously argued that the court should keep Cheney’s words secret because they may turn up on Comedy Central’s fake news program The Daily Show, embarrassing the former vice president.

He asked the court to delay disclosure for 10 years from the day President George W. Bush left office.

“Sullivan sounded highly skeptical of the government’s arguments, but he said he had not decided how he would rule in the case ‘Where do I draw the line? This happened five years ago,’ the judge said,” according to Politico. “‘Would there be impediments to putting this information in a time capsule?’”

The judge also complained that Obama’s Justice Department seemed to be asking him to create a vice presidential exception to the Freedom of Information Act — to legislate — “something courts can’t do,” he reportedly said.

“It sounds like Emmet Sullivan is not buying that argument–though he is also unwilling to just order the release of the interview without giving Obama’s DOJ an opportunity to waste more money protecting Cheney from embarrassment,” rattled blogger Marcy Wheeler.

Perhaps the most egregious argument given by Smith fell on the last line of Politico’s report: “‘Presidents don’t really have to cooperate if they really don’t want to,’ Smith noted, referring to President George H.W. Bush’s refusal to agree to an interview sought by Iran-Contra independent counsel Lawrence Walsh.”

While it is true the first President Bush refused to be interviewed in the Iran-Contra scandal, he said repeatedly in public that he was cooperating fully. The statements were seemingly in reference to his 1988 interview with the Office of Independent Counsel over the scandal. Later, in 1992, the OIC approached Bush again with more questions, specifically regarding his personal diary, but the White House refused while still publicly claiming “full cooperation.”

The OIC weighed the option of forcing the president to answer questions by forming a Grand Jury, but the idea was later dropped and seen as inappropriate should the proceedings not result in a criminal prosecution.

On Tuesday, President Obama reportedly granted a request from Cheney to extend secret service protection for the former vice president. Cheney’s security detail was set to expire six months after he left office. The extension grants him another six months of taxpayer-funded, personal security detail.