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Klayman on CNN’s Crossfire. . . BILL PRESS: Now CROSSFIRE continues. There's a long line of folks waiting to sue Dick Cheney over his refusal to release records of his Energy Task Force: the General Accounting Office, the Sierra Club, the Natural Resource and Defense Council, but Larry Klayman beat them all to the punch. He goes into federal court tomorrow afternoon to seek access to all documents which the White House still insists are privileged. But why wait until tomorrow? The CROSSFIRE courtroom opens for business right now. Representing Judicial Watch, Larry Klayman. TUCKER CARLSON: Larry Klayman, welcome. We know a lot about the president's energy policy. The task force report, as you know, has already gone to Congress. The policies themselves are available to the public. Why do you need information about the meetings that led up to those policies? And more to the point, why would any administration have any conversation of any kind if that administration thought it might end up on your website, promoting Judicial Watch? LARRY KLAYMAN, JUDICIAL WATCH: First of all, it's not just on our website. It's all over the papers. And this is a matter of public importance, Tucker. Open government is honest government. That's why we have these laws. The White House is subject to the Federal Advisory Committee Act. And that means that when you have these meetings, as occurred with the Hillary Clinton medical task force, and you're meeting with outside individuals, you have to open that up to the public. We're not challenging the internal deliberations of the White House. We're talking about meeting with energy lobbyists that want to stuff politicians' pockets with money. And I'm not just talking about the energy lobbyists, I'm talking about environmentalists, too. We want to see what they were doing because they were in there behind closed doors. And the American people, when they meet with those private interests, deserve that information. TUCKER CARLSON: Presumably. Executive privilege does protect deliberations that assist the president, as you know. And all this White House would have to do is claim executive privilege, and it would back off. They've essentially said that but they don't want to. KLAYMAN: No, no, no. See, you're wrong because executive privilege would apply to deliberations between people in the executive branch. Here they went to outside lobbyists. And those conversations are not privileged. We just went through this with Ken Starr and Monica Lewinsky in Clinton's conversations with people from the outside. Decision after decision ruled that you could not claim executive privilege. Nixon conversations he had outside of the White House with plumbers are not subject to executive privilege. This is a ruse. And what in fact, Cheney is doing, Tucker, is he's trying to run the clock out. He thinks that by the time this goes through the courts, that there won't be an Enron scandal.
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