The U.S. Supreme Court said Monday it will hear a petition by the Bush administration to block a lawsuit that seeks to compel Vice President Dick Cheney’s energy task force to reveal the names of energy companies that may have had a hand in crafting the administration’s energy policy in 2001.

The high court’s action comes three months after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia refused to overturn a lower court’s discovery order that required the Cheney task force to disclose the identities of the energy companies and executives (see Daily GPI, Sept. 15).

The appeals court at the time said the Bush administration was asking it to transform “executive privilege from a doctrine designed to protect presidential communications into virtual immunity from suit” and that “this court has no authority to ‘extend’ the law beyond its well-prescribed bounds.”

The lawsuit at the center of the dispute was brought by Judicial Watch, a watchdog group, in 2001. The Sierra Club, an environmental organization, has since joined the lawsuit pursing the records of the energy task force, including how it operated, who it met with and the vice president’s role.

The General Accounting Office (GAO), the investigative arm of Congress, also brought a lawsuit against the Bush administration to obtain task force-related documents, but it was dropped last February after a federal district court in Washington dismissed the suit (see Daily GPI, Feb. 10). The administration had refused to furnish the sought-after information to the GAO on the grounds that it would encroach on the authority of the executive branch.

Cheney, who chaired the task force, argued that the GAO’s authority extended to other federal agencies, but it did not reach to the Office of the President or Vice President. It was the first time that the GAO had brought legal action against the executive branch to compel the production of information and records.

In a 24-page report issued in August, the GAO said it was unable to determine conclusively the extent to which energy executives and companies may have influenced the drafting of the national energy policy due to the successful efforts of Cheney and other task force members to stall the agency’s investigation (see Daily GPI, Aug. 26).

The GAO had begun its pursuit of the energy task force records at the urging of Reps. Henry Waxman (D-CA) and John Dingell (D-MI), who suspected that large Bush campaign contributors, such as former Enron Corp. Chairman Kenneth Lay, had unduly influenced the drafting of the energy policy (see Daily GPI, April 23, 2001).

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