Cheney conceals travel expenses

The Washington Post picks up a story that UncommonSense posted on November 16th.

A report by the Center for Public Integrity finds that Vice President Dick Cheney's office has developed the practice of concealing certain travel costs. This practice is a circumvention of federal laws requiring annual reports on travel expenses of more than $250 received from outside groups.

The Post writes:

Cheney's office says nothing is amiss. In three letters since 2002 to the Office of Government Ethics, which collects the travel reports, David S. Addington, then Cheney's general counsel, noted that the reporting requirement applies to the "head of each agency of the executive branch."

"The Office of the Vice President is not an 'agency of the executive branch,' and hence the reporting requirement does not apply," wrote Addington, who this month replaced I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby as Cheney's chief of staff.

Since 2003, President Bush's office has reported hundreds of thousands of dollars in such travel, the center noted. And all but one office within the Executive Office of the President -- the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board -- has done so.

It doesn't matter, according to Addington. In a Feb. 25 letter to Marilyn Glynn, acting director of the ethics office, he wrote that "none of the Vice President's employees . . . accepted payments under Section 1353."

Yet, according to the center's research, Cheney has given 23 speeches to think tanks and trade organizations and 16 at academic institutions since 2001 -- apparently all at taxpayers' expense.

The bottom line is that, in his obsessive pursuit of secrecy, Cheney is forcing American taxpayers to pick up the tab for travel that should be paid for by non-federal government organizations.

Also of interest, and as we noted in our earlier post, is the contention that the V.P.s office is not an agency of the Executive Branch of the United States government. One wonders, then, how Cheney can claim executive privilege in refusing to answer questions about his Energy Task Force.