So you think Congress is ever going to get tired of being lied to and marginalized by this administration or, at this point, have they grown to kinda like it?
A White House document shows that executives from big oil
companies met with Vice President Cheney’s energy task force in 2001 —
something long suspected by environmentalists but denied as recently as
last week by industry officials testifying before Congress.
The
document, obtained this week by The Washington Post, shows that
officials from Exxon Mobil Corp., Conoco (before its merger with
Phillips), Shell Oil Co. and BP America Inc. met in the White House
complex with the Cheney aides who were developing a national energy
policy, parts of which became law and parts of which are still being
debated.
In a joint hearing last week of the Senate Energy and Commerce
committees, the chief executives of Exxon Mobil Corp., Chevron Corp.
and ConocoPhillips said their firms did not participate in the 2001
task force. The president of Shell Oil said his company did not
participate “to my knowledge,” and the chief of BP America Inc. said he
did not know.[…]The task force’s activities attracted complaints from
environmentalists, who said they were shut out of the task force
discussions while corporate interests were present. The meetings were
held in secret and the White House refused to release a list of
participants. The task force was made up primarily of Cabinet-level
officials. Judicial Watch and the Sierra Club unsuccessfully sued to
obtain the records.
The executives were not under oath when they testified, so they are not
vulnerable to charges of perjury; committee Democrats had protested the
decision by Commerce Chairman Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) not to swear in
the executives. But a person can be fined or imprisoned for up to five
years for making “any materially false, fictitious or fraudulent
statement or representation” to Congress.
It was always odd that Stevens had loudly rejected attempts to make his witnesses not lie to his committee. At the time, it just looked like a play for campaign donations, now it looks like complicity in their attempts to mislead. Stevens, the oil execs, and Cheney all have some ‘splaining to do.