[Video montage opening]

WH Deputy Press Secretary Dana Perino: Look, I’m not a legal scholar. There’s plenty of them that you can find in Washington DC. Just that very point that you’re making there shows that he has functions in both the legislative branch and the executive branch...

Reporter: It’s a little surreal, how is that possible that—

Perino: You’re telling me.

Reporter: that you, um, can’t give an opinion about whether the Vice President is part of the executive branch.

Perino: Look, all I know is that—

Reporter: It’s a little bit like saying I don’t know if this is my wife or not.

Perino: I think it’s a little bit more complicated than that.

Reporter: But honestly I mean, there’s no—

Perino: No honestly I think it’s more complicated than that. I do.
…
Perino: I mean, maybe it’s me, but I think that everyone is making this a little more complicated than it needs to be.
…
Brit Hume on Fox News Sunday: It appears therefore to be a violation by Cheney of this executive order. It’s easily remedied, but saying it’s because he has the constitutional duty to be the President of the Senate is, I think, not a good explanation.

Juan Williams on FNS: This is all a dodge, this is a game in order to, I guess, to keep Dick Cheney in some kind of secured, undisclosed bunker of his mind so that he can’t let the American people know what’s going on with their government, how decisions are made. He won’t tell people who’s visiting his house, who’s visiting his office. Scooter Libby is letting people know who works for the CIA. This is ridiculous.

[end video montage]


Josh Marshall: Hi this is Josh Marshall from TPM Media, It’s Wednesday, June 27th, 2007. As you can see, the Vice President’s claims that he doesn’t have to follow executive branch policies for safeguarding classified materials because he’s actually a member of the legislative branch, that’s not going over very well. But you know this isn’t just a matter of the arrogance of the Vice President. There’s actually reason to believe that the Vice President’s office is really not doing a very good job at protecting classified information. Now, a number of people have pointed to the Scooter Libby case as example number one that there’s a bit of a problem with the Vice President’s office but maybe you can say, “well, that was an intentional leak of classified information,” so maybe that doesn’t count.

[Picture Leandro Aragancillo]
JM: But who’s this guy? This is Leandro Aragancillo. He was a US Marine security official and last year he pled guilty to stealing classified documents from the Vice President’s office, where he worked at the time, and giving them to opposition leaders in the Philippines.

As far as we know he’s the only person ever to be caught committing espionage in the White House, so another bad day for the Cheney Office of Vice President. Now maybe you could say that this is just bad luck. You have the Scooter Libby case, you have the Aragancillo case. But there’s actually evidence now that it’s not, that there’s now evidence of systematic problems in, not only the Vice President’s office but the President’s office too, and problems they’re having safeguarding classified information.

Yesterday, Representative Henry Waxman, who’s the Chairman of the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee sent a letter to the White House counsel outlining a series of lapses in the protection of classified material that he’d found in an investigation he’s done of how the president’s office and the vice president’s office are safeguarding classified information at the White House. Here’s a couple examples, and this is just a sort of comedic example of what the problem might be.

The White House is apparently so secretive that they will not allow people from the White House security office, the people who are supposed to be in charge of making sure that classified information is taken care of at the White House. They’re so secretive, they won’t let these guys into the West Wing to do spot checks. So that’s maybe one of the reasons they are having these difficulties.

Some examples of what the problems have been: senior White House official left a classified document unattended in a hotel room. That’s one case. Uh—classified documents routinely left on White House officials’ desks. Senior White House official disclosed sensitive compartmented information to junior White House aide who had no security clearance. In fact, things have apparently gotten so bad that morale has dropped so low that half of the people of the personnel of the White House security office has left in the last year. That’s how bad it’s apparently gotten. And again, not just the Vice President’s office, but in the President’s office itself within the White House.

So this may not just be a problem of the Vice President not being able to figure out which branch of the government he’s in. It actually seems like there’s a serious problem in this White House in how they are safeguarding classified information. We’ll keep looking at this and we’ll report more to you on it at tpmmuckraker.com. I’m Josh Marshall for TPM Media, and we’ll talk to you tomorrow.

Special thanks to Tanvir Vahora for help transcribing.