With all the scandals to choose from in 2007, it's hard to pick a favorite. But here's one that qualifies: remember when Dick Cheney tried to evade oversight of his procedures for handling classified material by claiming that the vice presidency is outside the executive branch? And remember when the head of the classification-security office for the National Archives, a fellow named J. William Leonard, arched an eyebrow? And how that just made the vice president's men attempt to abolish Leonard's job?

Leonard certainly does. And now that he's retiring, he recounted the whole sorry story to Newsweek's Mike Isikoff.

So how did matters escalate? The challenge arose last year when the Chicago Tribune was looking at [ISOO's annual report] and saw the asterisk [reporting that it contained no information from OVP] and decided to follow up. And that's when the spokesperson from the OVP made public this idea that because they have both legislative and executive functions, that requirement doesn't apply to them.…They were saying the basic rules didn't apply to them. I thought that was a rather remarkable position. So I wrote my letter to the Attorney General [asking for a ruling that Cheney's office had to comply.] Then it was shortly after that there were [email] recommendations [from OVP to a National Security Council task force] to change the executive order that would effectively abolish [my] office.

Who wrote the emails?
It was David Addington.

No explanation was offered?
No. It was strike this, strike that. Anyplace you saw the words, "the director of ISOO" or "ISOO" it was struck.

What was your reaction?
I was disappointed that rather than engage on the substance of an issue, some people would resort to that…

A long, twilight struggle between Dick Cheney and the forces of evil is the subject of an impressive new Frontline documentary, "Cheney's Law," airing tomorrow on PBS. In the balance? The nation's legal traditions over interrogations, detentions, surveillance and every other liberty-security tradeoff made since the Cold War.

Here's a sneak preview:

Readers of Barton Gellman and Jo Becker's Cheney series, "Angler," will be familiar with a lot of this material. The battles fought by Cheney and his longtime legal counsel, David Addington, to expand unilateral executive authority over warmaking functions is the principal thrust of the narrative. But seeing many of the participants tell their stories on camera makes for compelling and vivid journalism. In particular, the documentary devotes a lot of time to Jack Goldsmith, the former Office of Legal Counsel chief who clashed sharply with Addington over interrogations and surveillance. Seeing Goldsmith's frustration, seriousness and occasional anguish adds a layer of complexity to the story that print can't often capture. It's a shame that neither Cheney nor Addington consented to interviews.

But that's not to say that Frontline doesn't advance the story.

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We'd be remiss if we didn't link over to fellow muckraker Charlie Savage's stay at TPMCafe this week to discuss his new book Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy.

It's long been apparent that the administration has sought to expand executive power whenever possible. But Savage's book documents the extent to which this was a conscious and controlling priority, especially for Dick Cheney -- so much so that Savage calls it "The Cheney Project." Go check it out.

A particularly telling excerpt from the book is below.

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If there's a villain in Jack Goldsmith's account of his time in the Justice Department, it's David Addington, Dick Cheney's legal alter ego. Addington, who became the vice president's chief of staff after Scooter Libby resigned following his indictment, served as Cheney's eyes and ears in the legal battles within the administration over warrantless surveillance, coercive interrogations and indefinite detentions. His style of argument, as recounted by Goldsmith, isn't exactly a subtle one.

[W]hen Goldsmith tried to question another presidential decision, Addington expressed his views even more pointedly. “If you rule that way,” Addington exclaimed in disgust, Goldsmith recalls, “the blood of the hundred thousand people who die in the next attack will be on your hands.”

Jane Mayer's profile of Addington introduced him as a zealot for unchecked presidential power during wartime. Barton Gellman and Jo Becker's series on Cheney added crucial detail, including Addington's role in functionally authoring White House opinions denying al-Qaeda detainees Geneva Conventions protection.

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The drumbeat against Iran from the administration has been constant this year -- reaching its highest pitch in February, when anonymous military briefers laid out the case to reporters. The Quds force, an elite military brigade, the administration line went, was channeling EFPs (explosively formed penetrators, a particularly dangerous type of IED) into Iraq to be used against U.S. soldiers.

The complications of the case were brushed aside, but despite an organized media offensive by the administration, it was not a wholly successful campaign. But lately the case has been revived. And now McClatchy reports that Dick Cheney has been pushing for strikes against Iranian forces in Iraq. But don't worry -- Cheney says that the administration ought to wait for "hard new evidence":

Behind the scenes, however, the president's top aides have been engaged in an intensive internal debate over how to respond to Iran's support for Shiite Muslim groups in Iraq and its nuclear program. Vice President Dick Cheney several weeks ago proposed launching airstrikes at suspected training camps in Iraq run by the Quds force, a special unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, according to two U.S. officials who are involved in Iran policy....

Cheney, who's long been skeptical of diplomacy with Iran, argued for military action if hard new evidence emerges of Iran's complicity in supporting anti-American forces in Iraq; for example, catching a truckload of fighters or weapons crossing into Iraq from Iran, one official said.

There is the expected divide within the administration on the question -- with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates on the other side. But a Cheney spokeswoman tells McClatchy "'the vice president is right where the president is' on Iran policy."

Note: The Los Angeles Times has an interesting companion to McClatchy's piece this morning, reporting on Bush's continued attempts to convince Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki that Iran is "not a force for good." From Maliki's perspective -- and Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai's -- things are obviously a lot more complicated.

I'd never thought I'd say this, but... somebody get Dick Cheney on message!

Alberto Gonzales and the administration have gone to great pains to say that the March 2004 hospital showdown was not about the Terrorist Surveillance Program -- no, it was about "other intelligence activities." And the Terrorist Surveillance Program is a phrase, they've said, that refers very narrowly to the surveillance activities confirmed by the President in December of 2005.

But Cheney got a little sloppy during his interview with Larry King:

Q In that regard, The New York Times -- which, as you said, is not your favorite -- reports it was you who dispatched Gonzales and Andy Card to then-Attorney General John Ashcroft's hospital in 2004 to push Ashcroft to certify the President's intelligence-gathering program. Was it you?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: I don't recall -- first of all, I haven't seen the story. And I don't recall that I gave instructions to that effect.

Q That would be something you would recall.

THE VICE PRESIDENT: I would think so. But certainly I was involved because I was a big advocate of the Terrorist Surveillance Program, and had been responsible and working with General Hayden and George Tenet to get it to the President for approval. By the time this occurred, it had already been approved about 12 times by the Department of Justice. There was nothing new about it.

Q So you didn't send them to get permission.

THE VICE PRESIDENT: I don't recall that I was the one who sent them to the hospital.

D'oh! So according to Cheney, the dispute was about the TSP. Too bad Cheney doesn't understand that the dispute was really about certain intelligence activities authorized by the president of which the Terrorist Surveillance Program (i.e. the program publicly described by the president) was only an uncontroversial part. Why can't he keep that straight? It's so simple.

So lump Cheney in with FBI Director Bob Mueller, Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA), Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI) and others who've been briefed on the NSA surveillance program and refer to a single program, called the TSP for a shorthand, which dates back to October, 2001 and is comprised of more than the limited facet acknowledged by the President.

I posted this excerpt yesterday, but missed this implicit admission that the dispute was about the TSP. So thanks to TPM Reader JS and commenter barney for the catch.

Note: Marty Lederman points to another revealing admission in this excerpt -- Cheney's implication that he could give "directions" to White House officials who work, of course, for the President.

From Dick Cheney's interview tonight with Larry King:

Q In that regard, The New York Times -- which, as you said, is not your favorite -- reports it was you who dispatched Gonzales and Andy Card to then-Attorney General John Ashcroft's hospital in 2004 to push Ashcroft to certify the President's intelligence-gathering program. Was it you?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: I don't recall -- first of all, I haven't seen the story. And I don't recall that I gave instructions to that effect.

Q That would be something you would recall.

THE VICE PRESIDENT: I would think so. But certainly I was involved because I was a big advocate of the Terrorist Surveillance Program, and had been responsible and working with General Hayden and George Tenet to get it to the President for approval. By the time this occurred, it had already been approved about 12 times by the Department of Justice. There was nothing new about it.

Q So you didn't send them to get permission.

THE VICE PRESIDENT: I don't recall that I was the one who sent them to the hospital.

Dick Cheney musters his vanishing popularity on behalf of Alberto Gonzales:

Vice President Dick Cheney said Monday that he is a "big fan" of embattled Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

In a interview with CBS News White House Correspondent Mark Knoller, the vice president also said Gonzales has been truthful in his testimony before Congress.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Pat Leahy, a Democrat, has said he doesn't trust Gonzales, but Cheney said the attorney general has the support of the only man who really counts.

"I've had my differences with Pat Leahy," Cheney said. "I think the key is whether or not he (Gonzales) has the confidence of the president — and he clearly does."

You can listen to the clip here:

Yet another dispiriting revelation from Alberto Gonzales' hearing today.

During Gonzales' last hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) questioned him about a memo from Attorney General John Ashcroft in 2002 that had substantially increased White House officials' access to information about Justice Department cases. Under Clinton, only four White House officials had been authorized to discuss pending criminal investigations or cases with only three top Department officials. Ashcroft's 2002 memo had blown the door off that arrangement, raising the number of officials who could discuss such cases from seven to 447 (417 on the White House side). Under Whitehouse's questioning, Gonzales had professed to have been "concerned about that as White House counsel.”

Apparently not so much.

Whitehouse questioned him today about a May, 2006 memo which Gonzales himself had signed while attorney general. You can see it yourself here.

The memo widened White House access to case information even more and seemed to have been crafted with special attention to enabling the Vice President's staff, specifically his chief of staff and counsel, to have the unambiguous authority to discuss ongoing cases with Department officials. Given Cheney's chief of staff David Addington's extraordinary reach into the Justice Department (and the prosecution of Cheney's former chief of staff), that's cause for a raised eyebrow.

Gonzales seemed to have been taken off guard by Whitehouse's questions:

Whitehouse: "What-on-earth business does the Office of the Vice President have in the internal workings of the Department of Justice with respect to criminal investigations, civil investigations, and ongoing matters?"

Gonzales: "As a general matter, I would say that's a good question."

Whitehouse: "Why is it here, then?"

Gonzales: “I’d have to go back and look at this.”

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At the dawn of the Bush administration, Vice President Dick Cheney's 2001 Energy Task Force was the hot social ticket for leading luminaries of future GOP scandals.

Once a closely-held secret, the Washington Post today publishes the dance card for the task force. Cheney, citing the principle of executive confidentiality, took the public's right not to know all the way to the Supreme Court when Congress tried to learn the attendance list published today. It comes as no surprise that the list was heavy on energy-industry big shots, including Enron's Kenneth Lay, who got a private meeting with Cheney on April 17, 2001:

One of the first visitors, on Feb. 14, was James J. Rouse, then vice president of Exxon Mobil and a major donor to the Bush inauguration; a week later, longtime Bush supporter Kenneth L. Lay, then head of Enron Corp., came by for the first of two meetings. On March 5, some of the country's biggest electric utilities, including Duke Energy and Constellation Energy Group, had an audience with the task force staff.

British Petroleum representatives dropped by on March 22, one of about 20 oil and drilling companies to get meetings. The National Mining Association, the Interstate Natural Gas Association of America and the American Petroleum Institute were among three dozen trade associations that met with Cheney's staff, the document shows.

The list of participants' names and when they met with administration officials provides a clearer picture of the task force's priorities and bolsters previous reports that the review leaned heavily on oil and gas companies and on trade groups -- many of them big contributors to the Bush campaign and the Republican Party.

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If at first Rahm doesn't succeed, try, try again in the Senate.

This afternoon, a Senate appropriations panel chaired by Dick Durbin (D-IL) stripped $4.8 million out of Vice President Cheney's budget for not complying with security rules for classified information. The move -- on a day consumed by Iraq -- came two weeks after a previous effort in the House by Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-IL) failed. It's unclear if the move will survive a full Appropriations Committee vote, but if Cheney wants his money back, all he needs to do is allow the National Archives' Information Security Oversight Office to perform a few unobtrusive inspections. Don't hold your breath, though.

It's been one subpoena-crazy day, what with the White House refusing to comply with congressional demands for information about nine fired U.S. attorneys. But there's at least one set of subpoenas that won't be issued today. Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) has been able to come to terms with the White House about the deepening White House Security Office scandal.

On Tuesday, Waxman wrote to White House Counsel Fred Fielding to detail new allegations that the WHSO -- entrusted to ensure compliance with procedures to safeguard classified information -- is dysfunctional. The heads of the office, just-departed director James Knodell and deputy Ken Greeson, took no action when presented with charges that aides to President Bush and Vice President Cheney left classified documents strewn throughout hotel rooms and across their desks, and they themselves took cellphones and Blackberries into secure facilities in violation of protocol. A frustrated Waxman told Fielding that unless House Government Oversight Committee investigators received access to interview three current and former White House officials who could speak to the alleged pattern of abuse, Waxman would ask the committee for authority to subpoena them.

Waxman said he'd seek the subpoena authority at the committee's business meeting today. But committee aides explain that the meeting is off, as Fielding and Waxman have reached an agreement, averting the subpoenas for now. The White House has consented to "transcribed interviews" with Alan Swendimen, director of the Office of Administration; Mark Frownfelter, an ex-security officer; and former WHSO head Jeff Thompson. "The fact that we were able to reach an agreement on testimony and getting the interviews to take place will be helpful in moving the committee's inquiry forward," says an Oversight Committee staffer.

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Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-IL) took a filleting knife to Vice President Dick Cheney's attempts to elide the Archives' Information Security Oversight Office on the House floor just now. Following through on his promise to defund the veep's office if it doesn't comply with an executive order mandating the ISOO inspect how each executive "entity" handles classified information, the House Democratic Caucus Chairman introduced an amendment to slice funding for the vice
president's office from the executive branch's budget. Watch:

Some choice excerpts:

Yesterday the vice president was forced to admit what even an eighth-grade student knew: there is no Cheney branch of government. While the vice president's excuses may change, his desire to ignore the rule remains just as strong as ever. The vice president is unwilling to risk that the documents detailing the flawed intelligence or faulty assumptions that led us into the war in Iraq [sic]. He has been held unaccountable for six years, and now he wants to be held unaccountable in the historical record as well...

If his office is not in the executive branch, then there is no executive branch office to fund. And perhaps more importantly, it underscores that the vice president is not above the law, and cannot ignore the rules. The law should follow him, whatever branch of government he chooses to hang his hat in.

Update: From Raw Story:

With limited members in the chamber, Rep. Emanuel's amendment appeared to be defeated by a voice vote. However, the bill is set to receive a recorded vote later in the day. A Democratic leadership staff member told RAW STORY that a party-line vote in favor of the amendment was expected.

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.

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Apparently that letter from David Addingtion to Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) yesterday really did constitute a wholesale retreat from the "fourth branch" argument. No more will you hear Cheney's lawyers claim that the vice president isn't in the executive branch, reports Mike Allen at The Politico:

The White House has no plans to reassert the argument there is any vice presidential distinction from the executive branch, the officials said.

Two senior Republican officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that the rationale had been the view of the vice president’s lawyers, not Cheney himself.

But as Addington made clear in his letter this morning (by a transparently weak argument), that doesn't mean that the vice president will submit to review by the National Archives' Information Security Oversight Office. So the game's still on. Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-IL) is still planning a vote late today or tomorrow on cutting off the VP's office $4.8 million in executive-branch funding. We'll keep you updated as that approaches.

Those salmon never stood a chance.

As The Washington Post reports this morning in part four of the paper's series on Vice President Cheney, when the fate of some endangered salmon threatened Republican electoral prospects in Oregon, Cheney sprang into action. Farmers wanted water from the Klamath River basin diverted for irrigation, but federal biologists said that two species of fish were at stake. From the Post:

Bush and Cheney couldn't afford to anger thousands of solidly Republican farmers and ranchers during the midterm elections and beyond. The case also was rapidly becoming a test for conservatives nationwide of the administration's commitment to fixing what they saw as an imbalance between conservation and economics.

And as the Post details, Cheney reached deep into the Interior Department to make sure that the issue was dealt with.

But Karl Rove also weighed in -- in his own way. Just in case the vice president's heavy hand wasn't enough, Rove made sure that Department officials far and wide knew where the administration stood on the issue by way of one of his now famous PowerPoint presentations.

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Dana Perino, the White House spokeswoman caught in the Dick Cheney information-security scandal, relies on the fact that she's not a lawyer to deflect questions on Cheney's claims to be outside both the executive and the legislative branches of government. What's David Addington's excuse?

Addington -- who served as Cheney's chief lawyer before becoming his chief of staff after Scooter Libby was indicted -- wrote a letter (pdf) to Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) yesterday defending Cheney's asserted exemption from review by the National Archives' Information Security Oversight Office. He's got two options: either argue that the Office of the Vice President is outside the scope of the executive order governing review of how executive branch agencies are supposed to handle classified material, or return to the claim that the veep is a unique branch of government and is exempt by default. Addington, somewhat surprisingly, chooses Option One.

The executive order on classified national security information -- Executive Order 12958 as amended in 2003 -- makes it clear that the Vice President is treated like the President and distinguishes the two of them from "agencies." The executive order gives the ISOO, under the supervision of the Archivist of the United States, responsibility to oversee certain activities of "agencies," but not of the Vice President or the President.

As TPMmuckraker highlighted yesterday, that amended order, known as Executive Order 13292, doesn't just deal with "agencies," it also deals with Executive Branch "entities." Former Justice Department lawyer Marty Lederman explains that because both the President's office and the OVP "are 'entities' within the Executive branch, they are 'agencies' covered by the E.O. (see section 6.1(b)) under a plain reading of the E.O."

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We knew from the Valerie Plame leak that the White House isn't exactly diligent with classified information. And we learned from Dick Cheney's claim that he's a fourth branch of government that he didn't really care who knew. But check out what Rep. Henry Waxman found.

In a letter today to White House Counsel Fred Fielding, Waxman disclosed numerous instances of sloppiness with classified material by both the president and the vice president's retinues, as well as what White House security officers told Waxman is a "systematic breakdown" in responding to security breaches. Indeed, according to Waxman, over half of the staff of the White House Security Office -- which is charged with protecting secrecy guidelines alongside the Archives' Information Security Oversight Office -- have quit over the last year.

To give the most baroque examples, Waxman's investigation found White House officials leaving classified material "unattended in a hotel room" as well as plopped on their desks at work. Typically, the White House Security Office did nothing in response.

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Dana Perino, the occasionally flustered White House spokeswoman, has at least been consistent in her line that the executive order governing classification procedures that's gotten Dick Cheney into trouble lately also doesn't apply to President Bush. Today The Los Angeles Times' Josh Meyer points out why Perino's been saying that: the president's office itself rebuffed the National Archives' Information Security Oversight Office. Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) found that in 2005, ISOO investigators came to the West Wing to inspect senior Bush aides' handling of classified information, only to be turned away by White House security officers. At the risk of a cheap shot, Saddam Hussein gave about as much access to UNMOVIC weapons inspectors in 2002 than Bush aides gave to the ISOO.

Now, here's the rub. If President Bush and Vice President Cheney clearly fall outside the scope of the executive order, as Perino said yesterday, why does ISOO, the agency directed under the order to ensure complaince, insist on inspecting them? The order, known as Executive Order 13292, gives the ISOO the authority "to conduct on-site reviews of each agency's program established under this order." Neither the president nor the vice president run any agency. But here's how EO 13292 defines "agency":

"Agency" means any "Executive agency," as defined in 5 U.S.C. 105; any "Military department" as defined in 5 U.S.C. 102; and any other entity within the executive branch that comes into the possession of classified information.

That's President Bush's language: he amended the executive order on March 25, 2003. (Basically, he gave the vice president power to automatically declassify information; it became an issue in the Valerie Plame leak case.) He could have easily cleared up any confusion about ISOO's ability to investigate his own office with a few uses of the word "exempt," but he didn't -- and now he's insisting that the order contains an implicit exemption.

It's an improvisatory kind of legal reasoning, it seems -- and it's no wonder Perino (who's apologizing all the time these days for her lack of a "legal mind") is having trouble keeping up.

Wouldn't you know it. Where there's a corruption investigation, there's also the Solomonic wisdom of Dick Cheney. And so it went with the William Jefferson affair, according to part three of Bart Gellman and Jo Becker's Cheney series. Had Cheney not changed his mind on the FBI's power to seize Jefferson's files, the top tier of Justice Department and FBI officials would have quit.

In May 2006, the FBI executed a warrant on Jefferson's House office, seizing numerous documents relevant to its bribery investigation. House Republicans -- and, let's not forget, now-Speaker Nancy Pelosi -- demanded the FBI relinquish what they'd taken from Jefferson, fearing the precedent the raid would set for other members of Congress and elevating the dispute to a separation of powers issue.

According to Gellman and Becker, Cheney sided with Congress, one of the few times that he's done so since joining the executive ... er, since becoming vice president. And, as the series has demonstrated, Cheney more often than not gets his way with the administration. This time, however, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, his deputy Paul McNulty, and FBI Director Robert Mueller all threatened to resign if forced to return Jefferson's files.

Here's what happened next:

White House Chief of Staff Joshua B. Bolten called a meeting on May 25, 2006, to resolve the political and legal crisis. The president's lawyers and congressional liaison were in the room, and so was Cheney. Once again, it was the vice president who came up with a solution, according to a participant. Cheney's plan met his goal of keeping the files from federal investigators. The files would be placed under seal for 45 days. Within hours of the meeting, Bush made Cheney's recommendation official.

The irresistible question: has Cheney inserted himself in the investigation of any other high-profile corruption scandals?

The vice president's office -- where information goes, never to return.

From today's Washington Post profile of Cheney (one part of four):

Stealth is among Cheney's most effective tools. Man-size Mosler safes, used elsewhere in government for classified secrets, store the workaday business of the office of the vice president. Even talking points for reporters are sometimes stamped "Treated As: Top Secret/SCI." Experts in and out of government said Cheney's office appears to have invented that designation, which alludes to "sensitive compartmented information," the most closely guarded category of government secrets. By adding the words "treated as," they said, Cheney seeks to protect unclassified work as though its disclosure would cause "exceptionally grave damage to national security."

Across the board, the vice president's office goes to unusual lengths to avoid transparency. Cheney declines to disclose the names or even the size of his staff, generally releases no public calendar and ordered the Secret Service to destroy his visitor logs. His general counsel has asserted that "the vice presidency is a unique office that is neither a part of the executive branch nor a part of the legislative branch," and is therefore exempt from rules governing either. Cheney is refusing to observe an executive order on the handling of national security secrets, and he proposed to abolish a federal office that insisted on auditing his compliance.

In the usual business of interagency consultation, proposals and information flow into the vice president's office from around the government, but high-ranking White House officials said in interviews that almost nothing flows out. Close aides to Cheney describe a similar one-way valve inside the office, with information flowing up to the vice president but little or no reaction flowing down.

Never in the history of the United States has anyone contended that the Vice President is outside the executive branch. Never. Not even during last call at a bar outside of the country's worst law school.

But then, in 2004, Dick Cheney needed to circumvent the National Archives' oversight of how his office handles classified information, and suddenly the vice president hovers in the constitutional equivalent of Purgatory, belonging to neither the executive nor the legislative branches. Poor Cactus Jack Garner: he thought the veep's job wasn't worth "a warm bucket of spit," when in fact the office bestrides constitutional governance like an all-powerful colossus.

It's hard to dignify Cheney's argument. But at her press conference today, White House spokeswoman Dana Perino managed to further undignify it, calling the question of the placement of the Vice President within the government " an interesting constitutional question that legal scholars can debate." To Perino, who generously conceded she is "not a lawyer," the role of the VP is "unique":

Let the debate begin.

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Surprise, surprise. From The Washington Post:

Attorneys for Vice President Cheney and top White House officials told a federal judge today they cannot be held liable for anything they disclosed to reporters about covert CIA officer Valerie Plame or her husband, former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV....

Attorneys for Cheney and the other officials said any conversations they had about Plame with each other and reporters were part of their normal job duties because they were discussing foreign policy and engaging in an appropriate "policy dispute." Cheney's attorney went farther, arguing that Cheney is legally akin to the president because of his unique government role, and has absolute immunity from any lawsuit.

"So you're arguing there is nothing -- absolutely nothing - these officials could have said to reporters that would have been beyond the scope of their employment [whether it was] true or false?," U.S. District Judge John D. Bates asked.

"That's true, your honor. Mr. Wilson was criticizing government policy," said Jeffrey S. Bucholtz, Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Justice Department's civil division. "These officials were responding to that criticism."