The Talmudic scholars have been parsing the latest White House utterances on whether the Vice President's office is part of the executive branch, and found that, the original ur-Executive Order that governs the preservation of classified data does not exempt that Vice President's office from its decree:

PERINO: If you look on page 18 of the EO, when you have a chance, there’s a distinction regarding the Vice President versus what is an agency. And the President also, as the author of an EO, and the person responsible for interpreting the EO, did not intend for the Vice President to be treated as an agency, and that’s clear.

Last night, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann reported that his staff fact-checked Perino’s claim, looked at page 18 of the order, and found Perino’s claim to be false:

OLBERMANN: No exemption at all for the Vice President on page 18. So we emailed the White House, which referred us to section 1.3 — which is about something else altogether — and 5.2 — which makes no mention of the Vice President. In fact, there is no exemption for the President or the Vice President when it comes to reporting on classified material.

IS the White House itself complying, but the VP's office not? From my non lawyerly skim of the EO, it's hard to find any language there that would justify that. There are a few indications that the Vice President should have in certain instances the executive authorities of the president to classify and declassify (for instance, section 1.3, "(a) The authority to classify information originally may be exercised only by: (1) the President and, in the performance of executive duties, the Vice President;"), but nothing that seems to say that the VP or his office is exempt from the rules that govern the executive branch. Via Steve Benen.

More here from the LAT. It seems this is descended from Nixon's "if the president does it, it's legal" philosophy, expanded to include the vice president.

Posted by Laura at June 23, 2007 09:52 AM