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I found this response to be remarkable, not only because the governing Order’s extraordinarily broad definition of an “agency” included “any other entity that comes into possession of classified information,” but especially in view of the OVP’s track record for handling classified national security information under Vice President Cheney. When queried by the Tribune, Cheney’s spokesperson replied that the OVP was not an “agency” under the Order and that the matter had “been thoroughly reviewed and it’s been determined that the reporting requirement does not apply to which has both legislative and executive functions.” In essence, the Vice President and his staff were claiming that with respect to the rules governing the safeguarding of classified national security information he was not a part of the executive branch and thus not beholden to the reporting requirements of the Executive Order. The Tribune picked up on a deliberate but obscure footnote included in the report which indicated that the classification statistics therein did not include the OVP. While I was required to submit this annual report to the president, I also viewed the report as a means to provide the public with insight into the state of government secrecy. In May of that year, the Chicago Tribune published an article based on the annual report my office prepared on the executive branch’s implementation of the Executive Order governing the safeguarding of classified national security information. My dispute with Vice President Cheney’s office first came to public light in 2006. Specifically (and notwithstanding common understanding), considering constitutional language, historical precedent and assertions by a recent Vice President and his staff, is the Vice President and his office subject to executive orders? As such, a 2006-07 dispute between my office and the OVP under Dick Cheney over reports dealing with the classification and declassification of information by that office highlighted a constitutional anomaly which has not been addressed even to this date and which has potential implications for the recently announced special counsel investigation into the handling of classified documents by then Vice President Biden and his staff. I know this because I sought an interpretation of the Order’s application to the Office of the Vice President (OVP) when I was responsible for overseeing the executive branch’s compliance with the rules regarding safeguarding classified national security information as the Director of the Information Security Oversight Office during the Bush administration. Bush – that’s because the specific status of the Vice President and his staff under the Order is murky. When a number of documents with classification markings where removed from then Vice President Biden’s office at the end of the Obama administration and stored at unsecure locations, violations of that same governing Order did not necessarily occur, at least according to the most recent position of the Department of Justice dating back to the administration of George W. Even if the documents in question had been declassified as asserted by the former president, at a minimum the governing Order, to which staff within the Executive Office of the President are clearly required to adhere, mandated that the records be appropriately marked to reflect their declassified status once they were removed from the control of the federal government. (It likely also violated federal statutes not discussed here, including the Presidential Records Act, and, depending on the facts, criminal statutes ). When documents bearing classification markings were apparently packed into boxes by White House staffers at the end of the Trump administration and shipped to unsecure locations, a violation of the Executive Order governing the classification and declassification of national security information clearly occurred.
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