The words “cover up” are likely be heard due to this development:
The White House and the Secret Service quietly signed an agreement last spring in the midst of the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal declaring that records identifying visitors to the White House are not open to the public.
And the true devil is in the details:
The Bush administration didn’t reveal the existence of the memorandum of understanding until last fall. The White House is using it to deal with a legal problem on a separate front, a ruling by a federal judge ordering the production of Secret Service logs identifying visitors to the office of Vice President Dick Cheney.
In a federal appeals court filing three weeks ago, the administration’s lawyers used the memo in a legal argument aimed at overturning the judge’s ruling. The Washington Post is suing for access to the Secret Service logs.
The five-page document dated May 17 declares that all entry and exit data on White House visitors belongs to the White House as presidential records rather than to the Secret Service as agency records. Therefore, the agreement states, the material is not subject to public disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act.
In the past, Secret Service logs have revealed the comings and goings of various White House visitors, including Monica Lewinsky and Clinton campaign donor Denise Rich, the wife of fugitive financier Marc Rich, who received a pardon in the closing hours of the Clinton administration.
The memo last spring was signed by the White House and Secret Service the day after a Washington-based group asked a federal judge to impose sanctions on the Secret Service in a dispute over White House visitor logs for Abramoff.
So it’s only Democrats out to get Republicans who demand documents such as this? Not quite:
In the mid-1990s, a conservative group, Judicial Watch, obtained Secret Service entry logs through a lawsuit.
Secret Service records played a significant role in the Whitewater scandal in the 1990s, supplying congressional Republicans with leads to follow in their investigations of the Clintons.
A decade ago, Senate investigators used Secret Service logs to document who visited the White House during the fundraising scandal surrounding President Clinton’s re-election campaign.
So this naturally means that a wide variety of conservative groups that wanted this kind of information examined and used against Clinton will now be raising this issue and insisting that this kind of info not be bottled up, and conservative talk show hosts will blast the White House as well, right?
If you believe that, let me tell you about a nice furry bunny that’ll hide painted eggs in your house this Easter….
But this is just one story. It isn’t part of a pattern, right? Read former Clinton political maven Paula Begala writing on The Huffington Post about Harriet Miers exit from the White House:
The only reason George W. Bush would turn loose of White House Counsel Harriett Miers – who gazes upon our president with an adoration and veneration bordering on idolatry – is because he wants a war-time consigliere.
In a way that might make Harry F. Byrd proud, our president is about to embark on a policy of massive resistance. He will instruct his lawyers to delay, deny and refuse to comply with any effort by Congress to get to the bottom of official corruption – especially as the billions squandered or stolen in Mr. Bush’s war. He’ll try to run out the clock, then take his chances with his hand-picked right-wing judiciary. (Keep in mind the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, through which this dispute would flow, includes such Bush appointees as Brett Kavanaugh, a Ken Starr protégé whose work in the Bush White House was described by Henry Waxman as promoting “an imperial presidency.” And the Supreme Court has such presidential suck-ups as John Roberts and Sam Alito.)
Time will tell. But taken together it seems as if the White House is engaged in circling the covered wagons and shoring up legal protections while getting ready to bring in bigger legal guns for a difficult two years of actual oversight. To a certain extent, it’s natural for the White House to shore up its legal team, faced with the prospect of near-certain hostile Democratic investigations. But this has the aroma of a cover up attempt aimed at keeping information locked away for political reasons.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.