Uh, oh — will Vice President Dick Cheney now charge that West Virginia’s Sen. Jay Rockefeller is “out of line”? McClatchy Newspapers reports:
Vice President Dick Cheney put “constant” pressure on the Republican former head of the Senate Intelligence Committee to stall an investigation into the Bush administration’s use of flawed intelligence on Iraq, the panel’s Democratic chairman charged Thursday.
In an interview with McClatchy Newspapers, Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia said it was “not hearsay” that Cheney, a leading proponent of invading Iraq, pushed Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., to drag out the probe.
“It was just constant,” Rockefeller said of Cheney’s alleged interference.
Cheney’s response is not surprising:
Cheney said in response to Rockefeller’s charge that he believes Sen. Roberts “was a good chairman” of the Intelligence Committee, spokeswoman Lea McBride said.
And you would think so — if he was indeed helping the Veep drag out the hearings so that information allowing the kind of oversight that Congress is supposed to do would not fall into unfriendly members of the legislative branch’s hands. AND:
Roberts’ chief of staff, Jackie Cottrell, said in an email statement it was Democrats’ fault the investigation remains incomplete more than two years after it was begun.
“Senator Rockefeller’s allegations are patently untrue,” she said. “The delays came from the Democrats’ insistence that they expand the scope of the inquiry to make it a more political document going into the 2006 elections. Chairman Roberts did everything he could to accommodate their requests for further information without allowing them to distort the facts.”
True? Now we’ll see. Because now that the GOP is not in charge of the entire Congress, more and more information is going to come out about this and other matters.
Will it show the administration provided complete information to the Congress (and public)? Or will Congressional hearings yet to come — and histories by non-Weekly Standard editors yet to be written — show that the administration in general, and Cheney, in particular, has been involved in keeping information away from Congress and the public and presenting other info that has not proven to be accurate?
You also have to wonder: there have now been a variety of news reports in recent months coming out unflattering to Cheney (including some that quote people associated with Bush 41’s administration). Why are all these people (including Republicans) picking on him? Are they all conspiring with Bob Woodward and Colin Powell to distort how forthcoming he has been in office?
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.