WASHINGTON, Jan 30: Congressional investigators are poised to file a historic lawsuit against the US government amid suspicions that energy companies like Enron had undue influence over the Bush administration’s energy policy process, a congressional source said on Wednesday.
The White House has repeatedly refused to turn over documents related to Vice President Dick Cheney’s energy task force, insisting it would hamper the administration’s ability to formulate policy.
The papers include documentation of meetings with officials from Enron Corp., the energy-trading giant that collapsed amid accusations of crooked reporting and accounting practices.
The General Accounting Office (GAO), Congress’s investigative arm, “is to post a letter on its website explaining the basis of the suit”, marking the first time the GAO has sued the executive branch, a spokeswoman for the House Democratic leadership said.
The letter will first be made available to House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt, she added.
Cheney has said he would rather go to court than divulge information from private interviews held in the White House with executives of the now-disgraced energy company while he was formulating the administration’s national energy plan.
Opponents of the plan have accused the administration of being too close to corporate special interests.
Cheney reportedly held six meetings with Enron executives.
“There’s no secret about what we did with respect to the task force,” Cheney maintained Sunday on Fox television.
The role scandal-plagued Enron executives played in the development of the federal energy plan presented last spring by the White House is under the microscope, with questions over the extent to which the company may have influenced federal policy possibly subject to federal prosecution, US Comptroller General David Walker has said.
The GAO has been denied in its repeated requests to the White House for documents produced by the energy task force headed by Cheney, himself the former head of oil giant Halliburton.—AFP