Hours after the deadline passed for the White House and the Office of the Vice President to comply with congressional subpoenas, the White House late last Tuesday began turning over documents to the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee related to its contacts with the now-bankrupt Enron Corp. The committee said “one box and one accordion folder of documents” had been delivered by the end of the day, containing about 2,170 pages of e-mails and other papers.

The Bush White House released the Enron-related papers only after Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-CT), who chairs the Senate panel, agreed to take “extraordinary security precautions” with the subpoenaed information. The documents “will be held in a locked room, equipped with an alarm,” Lieberman said. “Only a limited number of staff will have access to the room, all of whom will have signed confidentiality agreements.”

The White House documents will be made public only if either Lieberman or the committee’s ranking Republican, Sen. Fred Thompson of Tennessee, determine that “disclosure is appropriate to further the purposes of the investigation,” Lieberman noted. The committee must give the White House “24-hour written notice” before documents are released. In addition, Lieberman said the committee has agreed to protect any “personal privacy information” contained in the papers.

“I’m satisfied we have come to an accommodation on the security of these documents…while refusing to yield the committee’s right to conduct its investigation” into White House ties to Enron, he noted. “I look forward to determining what, if anything, the federal government might have done differently to avoid these problems.” The Senate Governmental Affairs panel is one of many congressional committees that are investigating Enron accounting and financial irregularities.

The White House made 1,745 pages of Enron papers available for review last Monday to the committee’s staff at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, which is adjacent to the White House, but it had not physically turned over the documents then. The Office of the Vice President provided an additional 436 pages of documents. White House Counsel Alberto R. Gonzales said that none of the documents gathered by the White House so far point to inappropriate contacts between White House staff and Enron.

The two subpoenas, which the committee issued on May 22, required the Office of the President and Office of the Vice President to supply documents related to its Enron contacts by June 3rd, but Lieberman extended the deadline by one day, at the request of Thompson. Lieberman’s committee had first requested the documents back in March.

The security “protocols” for the White House documents are necessary because they include people’s Social Security numbers and e-mail addresses, as well as confidential information between the executive and legislative branches, said White House spokesman Ari Fleischer at a Tuesday press briefing.

“We will continue to work cooperatively with the committee,” Fleischer said, adding that the committee needs to “work diligently” and “not turn everything into a news release.”

Fleischer said he hoped the committee would limit its request for documents to only those reflecting on the White House staff’s prior knowledge of Enron plans to file for bankruptcy last December. The inquiry shouldn’t be an “open-ended fishing expedition about any contact with anybody at Enron for any reason,” he said, adding that the public has “grown tired” of these. The committee subpoenas sought all documents related to White House-Enron contacts for the period of Jan. 1, 1992 through Dec. 2, 2001.

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