Waxman to Gonzales: So, Is the Veep in the Exec. Branch?

Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) continues his full-court press on Dick Cheney’s claims to be exempt from oversight on how his office handles classified information. In a just-released letter (pdf) to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, Waxman — joined by House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) and rep. William Lacy Clay (D-MO) — asks after the status of a DOJ review requested by the head of the Archives’ Information Security Oversight Office in January to settle the matter of whether the vice presidency resides in the executive branch:

Due to conflicting statements from your department, the status of your review in this matter is unclear. More than six months have passed since (ISOO Director J. William) Leonard’s letter to you, and the Information Security Oversight Office has received no response to its inquiry. … Last week, however, a spokesperson in the Department of Justice stated that this matter is under review in the department.

The letter goes on to request information sure to make Gonzales’s life so much easier: who’s involved with the review, what work they’ve accomplished, what (if any) communications they’ve had with the White House or OVP on the question, whether DOJ has taken any position on which branch of government — if any! — the VP belongs to, and more. Closest to the bone, however, is this question:

When you were serving as White House Counsel, were you or anyone in your office involved with the drafting, assessing or otherwise reviewing proposed revisions to the Executive Order in 2003?

The day just gets worse for Gonzales. If he was involved in the 2003 revision to EO 12958 (which became EO 13292), then he’d be able to speak to the question of whether the order always intended for the veep to be exempt — which would further raise the question of whether Gonzales accepted David Addington’s theory that the vice presidency is outside the executive branch. After all, the White House’s fallback line in the controversy has been that president never “intended” for EO 13292 to apply to Cheney, thereby begging the question of what legal ground that contention is based upon. As White House counsel when President Bush revised the EO, Gonzales or a deputy must have looked at it; if no one from the counsel’s office did, that itself is scandalous.