Democrats from the Senate Intelligence and Judiciary committees last week sent a letter to the White House demanding that it preserve all records produced by the Bush administration. The letter expressed particular concern that the office of Vice President Cheney would not comply with the law.
The letter, sent by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, Sen. John D. Rockefeller of West Virginia and Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, asks White House counsel Fred Fielding to detail steps being taken to preserve White House documents and hand them over to the National Archives and Records Administration.
And it asks whether Fielding has investigated a Washington Post report that the White House has kept some presidential orders off it records, in a safe in the office of the vice president’s lawyer.
Cheney’s office is separately involved in a lawsuit brought by the watchdog group CREW, which is seeking to ensure that all vice presidential records are made available to the public.
The Democrats’ letter cites that litigation, noting, “the declarations filed in that case by the Office of the Vice President raise serious concerns about its interpretations of the (Presidential Records Act).”
The law requires all presidential and vice presidential records to be transferred to the National Archives as soon as the president leaves office.