Dick Cheney’s continued refusal to hand over the notes, minutes and miscellaneous doo-dads of the White House Energy Task Force (ETF) is very bad news for the White House. All that’s unclear is what kind of bad news it is.
Let’s run through the possibilities.
Possibility #1: There’s really nothing in the ETF notes, the White House has a deep ideological belief in executive branch privilege and thus secrecy (which is clearly true). On principle, on separation of powers grounds, they’re resisting encroachments from the Congress.
End Game: The administration is eventually compelled to turn over the notes, either politically or judicially. Nothing bad is revealed, but the period of resistance fuels and continues the Enron cloud over the White House, perhaps even creating the investigative pressure that unearths other things we don’t know about. It keeps Enron as an issue deeper into election season. The fact that nothing was found in the notes after all doesn’t undo the damage. That’s reported in Section L, page 79 of the The New York Times.
Possibility #2: There’s really nothing in the ETF notes, but the White House has made a strategic decision to resist ceding the investigative initiative to the Congress and realizes that this is where it has to make its stand.
End Game: See end game for #1 (above).
Possibility #3: There’s nothing illegal revealed in the ETF notes, but they describe a hand-in-glove closeness between the administration and energy companies, particularly Enron, that will be deeply embarrassing.
End Game: The administration is eventually compelled to turn over the notes, either politically or judicially. The period of resistance fuels and continues the Enron cloud over the White House, perhaps even creating the investigative pressure that unearths other things we don’t know about. Weeks or months of resistance amplify the damage of the embarrassing revelations.
Possibility #4: It’s really as bad as you can imagine. The notes reveal either illegal acts (which I find hard to believe) or one of the following: a) foreknowledge of Enron’s problems, b) a direct nexus between money contributions and efforts to help Enron, c) various bad stuff that will lead heavyweights to resign.
End Game: The administration is eventually compelled to turn over the notes, either politically or judicially. Various people end up doing time or resigning their appointments. It was a good strategy because they had to keep the information secret if they could. It just didn’t work.
My money is on a possibility #3, with #1 and #2 thrown in for good measure.
