http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64818-2002Aug26.html President Bush's lawyers are trying to keep secret the inside stories of President Bill Clinton's last-day pardons by invoking a claim of executive privilege that extends far beyond the White House. In pleadings filed in U.S. District Court here this month, including affidavits from White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales and Deputy Attorney General Larry D. Thompson, the Bush administration contends that the privilege covers not only advice given to a president about individual pardons, but also government papers he has never seen and officials he has never talked to, such as the sentencing judge in a particular case. The stance, taken in opposition to a lawsuit filed by the nonprofit group Judicial Watch for access to Clinton pardon records, represents a hard line that the government has never taken. In the past, executive privilege has been recognized for advisers who operate within the White House. Bush's lawyers say it covers officials in any part of the government who are asked for input about pardon requests.
Eventually someone is going to be arguing that anyone who ever queued up for the White House tour is subject to executive privilege. This isn't really a partisan issue IMO. Many members of many US governments (including NJ Dem governor McGreevey) are trying to keep all of their internal deliberations and paperwork out of the public eye, regardless of whether or not the security of the country depends on it. Anything that could remotely be considered political is potential ammunition for opponents, so why bother releasing anything? And the idea is not necessarily to keep everything really away from the public as much as it is to keep things away for so long that, once they're released, nobody notices or the re-election bid has already passed. Rudy Giuliani, who I respect as a great leader and tactician, was the master of this for his first four years as NYC mayor. And it helped get him re-elected in a landslide in 1997. Somebody somewhere needs to have the security clearance to determine what is or is not too sensitive to release to the public, instead of trying to get these blanket exceptions to the FOIA.
Just seems odd that a supposed small-government kind of guy is doing everything in his power to increase the powers of the executive branch, what with this and the idea that he can circumvent Congress vis a vis a war.
And we should be surprised by all this why? http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A40761-2001Dec13 Check out the dateline - invoking executive privilege on seemingly innocuous "cases" is now de rigeur for the Bush administration. I'd like to believe that it's for some ideological reason, but I think it's slightly more obvious that this is an ass-covering precedent as transparent as saran wrap.