Wampum

Yesterday, I was more than a little surprised to read Tom Tomorrow's well-hedged piece on the stunning documents on Cheney's Energy Task Force meeting obtained recently by Judicial Watch. Now, I wasn't particularly shocked that JW had the documents in question, as I vaguely remember a recent federal appeals court ruling in their, and co-plaintiff Sierra Club's, favor regarding attempts to obtain documents over which Cheney was claiming executive privilege.

With the whirl of other media events yesterday, I'd put the Cheney Task Force story on my back burner, and only moved it back to the front when I found myself with up alone at 4:30 this morning. So, in an effort to get a more comprehensive view of the story, I started Googling the news, pulling up first an article in the Houston Chronicle. General run-of-the-mill coverage, until the last few paragraphs:

The papers were part of a 16-page package sent July 3 to Judicial Watch, a conservative government watchdog group that has been wrestling with the Bush administration since April 19, 2001, to learn more about the deliberations of the Cheney task force. That panel produced a controversial road map for reducing the United States' dependence on foreign energy supplies with a call for greater domestic production.

...

The administration gave Judicial Watch no explanation as to the timing of the documents' release.

Now, the question of "timing" struck me as odd, as obviously the documents were released because of the Court of Appeals ruling, right? Well, a little more Googling uncovered that the ruling was decided on July 8th, 5 days after Cheney's office forwarded the package to Judicial Watch.

While the timing of the hand off of the Task Force documents is curious enough, the fact that Judicial Watch kept mum for two weeks is also rather puzzling, particularly in light of this Judicial Watch chairman and general counsel Larry Klayman's July 11th interview with Bill Moyers on Now:

MOYERS: When do you think you will actually get your hands on some of these documents?

KLAYMAN: Very soon. You'll start seeing these documents coming out in the latter part of this year.

And they may show no wrongdoing by the Bush administration. We've never presumed that there were… there were illegal acts. But we need to have full disclosure. Because energy policy is so much tied to the war in terrorism that it's even a matter of national security that the American people know what's going on.

MOYERS: When you get your hands on those documents, will you come back and tell us what you've found?

KLAYMAN: I'll be happy to.

Of course, most of us thought JW and the Sierra Club were going after Cheney's Energy Task Force due to domestic policy concerns, such as undue influence by Ken Lay and other corporate energy cronies. It's rather surprising to see Klayman make the "terrorism" and "national security" references; I guess that package from the Eisenhower Executive Office Building didn't sit unopened on his desk over the long holiday weekend.

[Nota bene: Of the 100+ articles in the past day on the Energy Task Force documents, only the Houston Chronicle mentions the July 3rd date of receipt.]