Oh, Now They're Trying to Insist on Their Responsibility to Archive
It seems like BushCo–particularly Cheney–have been fighting for about 2 years to limit their responsibility under the Presidential Records Act to actually supply their papers to the National Archive in usable and timely fashion.
Well, all of a sudden, they’re arguing the contrary–that the papers have to go immediately.
The new Congress on Thursday asked a federal judge to force the Bush White House to keep documents on the controversial firings of nine federal prosecutors instead of turning them over to the National Archives.
[snip]
They asked U.S. District Judge John Bates to order the administration to leave the documents at the White House in the custody of President-elect Barack Obama’s aides in case the information is needed.
Justice Department lawyers argued that the White House is required to turn the material over to the National Archives.
[snip]
The National Archives has already agreed to segregate the subpoenaed material from the rest of Bush’s documents in case it is needed by the courts or the Obama administration, lawyers said.
"If they want the documents, they can request them from NARA," lawyer Carl Nichols said.
But Bates said he had no doubt "there will be some delay if the materials are sent" to the Archives. The judge suggested that he may order the administration to make copies of the documents so they can send the originals to the Archives and make the copies available to the incoming administration.
He said he would make a final ruling on Friday.
This is all follow-up to the rule passed on Tuesday that allows the House Judiciary Committee to pick up its pursuit of testimony in the US Attorney firing investigation right where they left off.
I guess Conyers didn’t want to have any down time during the early days of this Congress.
Update: And in somewhat related move, a different District Court Judge ruled that BushCo doesn’t get to hide what kind of wingnuts were visiting Cheney’s house.
A federal judge on Friday rejected the Bush administration’s latest attempt to keep secret the identities of White House visitors and declared that it engaged in illegal record-keeping practices.
[snip]
A watchdog group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, asked for the records to determine whether nine conservative religious leaders visited the White House and Vice President Dick Cheney’s residence in October 2006.
Lamberth’s decision means the government will have to find other legal grounds if it wants to block release of the Secret Service logs.
All this transparency is getting sort of exciting.
A pity we didn’t get it about 2 years ago.
For a crew that fought Archive tool and nail throughout their maladministration, this is pretty funny, yeah.
Oh, and no doubt all this highly paid NARA archivists have nothing more to do this month than hop right on this little request from BushCheney. /s
My bad.
Looks like Conyers needs another ‘meet-up’ in a Coffee Shop … is Jane ready with that VideoCam ?
Other than a short amount of time, what do they hope to gain?
And why would Conyers not just phone up the archives and say “As soon as you’ve got those cataloged, fax me copies”?
Boxturtle (obviously, I’m missing something)
That clause in the PRA has bothered me, for some reason.
Do we know who is arguing with Congress that these records must be dispatched to NARA right away? Is it Bush’s people or Cheney’s people.
I strongly believe that Cheney has long had this records thing planned out and the records are already out of the White House. And I believe they are already out of the White House because the VP used the authority quoted above and somehow convinced the Archivist it was in the “public interest” to have the VP’s records in a non-Federal repository.
Now one just has to figure out where that repository is.
Start with property owners who are loyal Reps and/or government contrators in Iraq.
Maybe Cheney’s health is failing faster than is publicly believed. ??
DIGG is open. (I tried 3 times to get the URL to work here, failed)
pup34
copies??? would you trust these guys to make ‘accurate’ copies???
Regarding the update, is has been reported that all related visitor records about those who came to the Vice President’s Residence were regularly transcribed from Secret Service computers into a written log and then that log (one copy in existence) was given to the VP’s staff.
Even if CREW gains the right to see the logs, it doesn’t mean there will be a log to see.
citizen92 – yes… there is an opaque atmosphere around the vp’s office but ginned up info can always be found at the right moment when needed..
Go Jane
Just when the “cheney” will Cheney be held accountable for any of his crimes?
Back door energy policy, creating and using false intelligence, outing Plame, illegal wiretapping, torture. My stonmach turns when ever they provide Cheney with air time to lie some more.
I think there are going to be several more events like this leading up to the inauguration. Doc dumps, interviews, yadda yadda…they’re going to use the rising tide in interest in the new administration to expose their deeds until the last minute when everybody involved is pardoned.
Cheney: Well the red phone was ringing and ringing and the President had just run out of toilet paper so I ….
and yet we will never get to see who it was that “helped” Darth craft that energy piece of garbage policy.
My head hurts.
B.Leonard wrote in December 2007 about some relevant processes, as well as the new celerity with which documents are likely to enter the research milieu.
The American people have no appetite for
second-guessing the patriotic actions of
the last 8 years. Just ask Ruth Marcus.
And Cass Sunstein.
“Bygones!”
Maybe those 2 are anorexic; the rest of us can speak for ourselves.
I can’t wait to see what comes out into the open once Bushco vacates the Whitehouse!
I see a large number of Bobcats running and scooping up all the BushCo crap they left just to clean a path through the place.
Nevermind all the skeletons in the closet!
Who knew the Bush Regime archived? Huh. And all this time I thought they deleted only or encased hard drives in cement and threw them in the ocean…
Silly me.
Thanks for the tip !!
OT:
read this:
“Americans and others have no idea what is going on nor do they understand the gravity of the situation. This is an event that only happens once every 500 to 1,000 years. This is going to be one of the granddaddies of all collapses.
The elitists had to play boosting the value of real estate to dizzying heights and then burying it in structured finance. In a world of stable real estate prices, SIV’s and CDO’s were relatively risk free, but this was not a stable environment. Professionals should have realized that normal rules didn’t apply. Foreign banks, hedge funds, insurance companies and other institutions bought 70% of what became toxic waste, as they poured dollars back into the US economy supplying at times $3 billion a day in investment to keep America from going bankrupt. The buyers knew that lending practices had changed dramatically and that risk had increased exponentially. Eighty percent of mortgages were being securitized.
Greed drove all the players from the borrowers to the buyers of what became toxic garbage. A daisy chain of corruption and greed. The buyers were not happy with a better yield, they had to borrow money and leverage the CDOs and SIVs 30 to 100 to one. As you know we have just witnessed the de-leveraging of this process and the devastating effect it has had on all markets and the world economy. The elitists got the ball rolling by getting revenge on Bear Stearns by financially assassinating them and looting the valuable assets of the company. The recipient was JP Morgan Chase, a major owner of the Federal Reserve, which you loaned $29 billion to pull off this theft. This started the de-leveraging and the run on the derivatives. Lehman Brothers was next and their demise caused even more havoc.
Just prior to that was the collapse of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, both derivative borne disasters. Taxpayers are on the hook for $9.4 trillion and climbing. The Fed refuses to say who received their largess and what the terms are. Citigroup will cost $1 trillion and AIG $500 billion. The Treasury is backstopping $600 trillion in derivatives and the Fed and the Treasury are doing the same for the entire structured finance segment. The latter and municipal bonds are essentially frozen. There are few buyers.”
Linky, Or did you author it?
Well written either way.
http://theautomaticearth.blogspot.com/
Good for saying that “In a world of stable real estate prices, SIV’s and CDO’s were relatively risk free”. These “professionals” should have known better than to allow these sales to go thru and pushing them thru. But and its a big but. Prices rose because of demand and demand was fueled by the notion that all people could afford to buy a house and should be able too. Many people can’t at this time, the financial literacy in this country abysmal and people go into the closing signing and initialing 50 sheets of paper all the while not reading any of them and not understand what they are doing. Understanding would have averted most of the economic crisis we are now under. People may have been urged and pushed and blah blah blah but ultimately they signed the papers, said they understood and now complain that they were taken advantage of. Same with credit cards, come on, don’t use what you don’t understand. Always strive to understand, learning doesn’t end when you complete what ever schooling you stop at. Of course there are special circumstances that took place but on the whole I believe many people shot themselves in the foot.
Well, we coulda had a chance 2 years ago, but a certain someone kept insisting that a certain something was “off the table.”
Sure was a lonely table these last two years…
… ly happens once every 500 to 1,000 years. This is going to be one of the granddaddies of all collapse
I have dreams of myself and my family traveling the roads with all of our belongings piled into the back of my pick-up. Like something out of the Grapes Of Wrath.
Brother can ya spare a dime?
In a similar view as the opening post from ew, prof Cooper in a January 3 2009 post observes that the administration’s plan for all federal government branch websites is to erase them January 20, pursuant to Bush’s EO1333 (2001). See second item on that public policy page.
OT or maybe not — So if the Bush administration leaves office with a judgement against it in the visitor logs case, do they retain any ability to pursue an appeal (and withhold the logs in the meantime) after the 20th? Or does loss of the office somehow change the rules of standing for an appeal, or else somehow moot the outcome of same?
erratum: EO13233.