David Addington - Vice President's Office

Vice President's Office

As counsel to the Vice President, Addington's duties involved protecting the purported legal interests of the Office of the Vice President, despite the only duties actually given the U.S. Vice President under the United States Constitution are to be first in line to succeed the President in the event of his or her death, or a statutorily-defined inability to effectively discharge the powers of the office, and to be the presiding officer of the United States Senate, with the duty to cast a deciding vote in that body in the event of any tie votes among the members of the Senate itself.

As chief of staff, he supervised the Vice President's staff. In both roles, Addington also provided advice to the White House staff, as he had the additional bureaucratically important title of Assistant to the President, as his predecessor Scooter Libby had likewise held. As vice presidential counsel, Addington is known for his focus on the constitutional independence of the Vice President, including in the context of federal lawsuits to prevent incursions into the inner workings of the Office of the Vice President by the Government Accountability Office and private organizations. After he began working for Vice President Cheney, Addington was very influential in many different areas of policy. He provided advice and drafted memoranda on many of the most controversial policies of the Bush administration. Addington's influence strongly reflects his hawkish views on U.S. foreign policy, a position he had apparently already committed to as a teenager during the late phase of the Vietnam War in the early 1970s. In his House Judiciary Committee testimony, Addington said that he applied three filters in formulating advice on the War on Terror: (i) comply with the Constitution, (ii) within the law, maximize the President's options, and (iii) ensure legal protection of military and intelligence personnel engaged in counterterrorism activities.

Addington has consistently advocated that under the Constitution, the President has substantial and expansive powers as commander-in-chief during wartime, if need be. He is the legal force behind over 750 signing statements that President George W. Bush issued when signing bills passed by Congress, expanding the practice relative to other Presidents. Charlie Savage, the former national legal affairs writer for The Boston Globe who won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on signing statements, quotes former associate White House counsel Brad Berenson saying that Addington "would dive into a 200-page bill like it was a four-course meal" as he crafted the statements.

A declassified CIA congressional briefing memo of February 4, 2003 states "The (CIA) General Counsel described the process by which the (enhanced interrogation) techniques were approved by a bevy of lawyers from the NSC, the Vice President’s office and the Justice Department," which makes it likely that Addington was aware of the coercive methods if not one or more of the "torture memos" as well, although it is not clear exactly what the CIA memo meant by the word 'approved' as none of the lawyers mentioned was in the chain of command that approves CIA operations and the White House-level lawyers relied on Justice Department legal opinions rather than developing and issuing legal opinions of their own. Press reports have alleged that Addington helped to shape an August 2002 opinion from the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) that said torture might be justified in some cases, although John Yoo - who actually wrote those memos himself - avers in a book he later authored that the notion that Addington "had a hand in drafting Justice Department legal opinions in the war on terrorism" is "so erroneous as to be laughable."

U.S. Army Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as Colin Powell's chief of staff when he was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff - at the same time Addington was Cheney's personal counsel as Secretary of Defense - and then later when Powell was Secretary of State, stated in an in-depth interview regarding extraordinary measures taken post 9/11: "...the man who, to me, brings all of this together more than Cheney himself, because he has one foot in the legal camp — and I must admit it’s a fairly brilliant foot — and he has one foot in the operator camp, that’s David Addington."

Press reports also state that Addington reportedly took a leading role in pressing for the use of coercive interrogation methods when a delegation of top Bush administration attorneys traveled to the Guantanamo Bay detention camp in September 2002 to observe operations there, although Addington said that he could not recall this in his sworn House Judiciary Committee testimony. In congressional testimony, Addington has emphasized that "people out in the field, particularly the folks at the CIA, would not have engaged in their conduct and the head of the CIA would not have ordered them to engage in that conduct without knowing that the Attorney General of the United States or his authorized designee, which is what OLC is, has said this is lawful and they relied on that." The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released a narrative concerning the Office of Legal Counsel opinions on interrogations on April 17, 2009.

Some press reports indicate that Addington advocated scaling back the authority of lawyers in the uniformed services; Addington in fact advocated merely that the civilian general counsels of the military departments be recognized as the chief legal officers of those departments.

Shortly after September 26, 2002, a Gulfstream jet carrying Addington, Alberto Gonzales, CIA attorney John A. Rizzo, William Haynes II, two Justice Department lawyers, Alice S. Fisher and Patrick F. Philbin, and the Office of Legal Counsel's Jack Goldsmith flew to Camp Delta to view the facility that held enemy combatants, including Mohammed al-Kahtani, then to Charleston, South Carolina to view the facility that held enemy combatants, including José Padilla, and finally to Norfolk, Virginia, where they briefly viewed an enemy combatant on a videoscreen display.

In November 2006, the German government received a complaint seeking the prosecution of Addington and 15 other current and former U.S. government officials for alleged war crimes. The German Prosecutor General at the Federal Supreme Court declined to initiate proceedings on the complaint.

According to Harvard Law School professor Jack Goldsmith, the head of the Office of Legal Counsel from 2003 to 2004, Addington once said that "we're one bomb away from getting rid of that obnoxious court," referring to the secret United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which oversees clandestine wiretapping. Goldsmith also noted that Addington was speaking sarcastically at the time. Washington Post reporter Barton Gellman writes that Addington was the author of the controlling legal and technical documents for the Bush administration's warrantless surveillance program, typing the documents on a Tempest-shielded computer across from his desk in room 268 of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building and storing them in a vault in his office. That area of the building was the site of a fire in December, 2007.

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell is alleged to have remarked in private, regarding who was responsible for the NSA wiretapping of U.S. citizens without a warrant: "It's Addington," and further, that "he doesn't care about the Constitution." when speaking with friends at a Washington Redskins game. Jack Goldsmith has written that if Powell indeed made this remark, "he was wrong," as Addington and Cheney "seemed to care passionately about the Constitution as they understood it." Further, it is alleged, at least during Cheney's term as Secretary of Defense from 1989–93, that Addington and Cheney were deeply and eagerly interested in the U.S. Continuity of Operations Plan (CO-OP), to be used in the event of a nuclear attack on the U.S. (and first partially implemented after 9/11/01). This plan is alleged to provide "enduring Constitutional government" under a "paramount unitary executive" with "cooperation from" Congress and the several Courts. This deep and eager interest in the CO-OP was reported by the New Yorker to extend to drills where Cheney spent his nights in a bunker, perhaps that "secure undisclosed location" which he was said to occupy following 9/11. Apparently Addington has taken this interest to the point where "For years, Addington has carried a copy of the U.S. Constitution in his pocket; taped onto the back are photocopies of extra statutes that detail the legal procedures for Presidential succession in times of national emergency..." perhaps, even a national emergency that involves the CO-OP.

Although press reports state that Addington consistently advocated the expansion of presidential powers and the unitary executive theory, a nearly absolute deference to the executive branch from Congress and the judiciary, Addington stated in his sworn House Judiciary Committee testimony that he intends the term "unitary executive" to refer to the provision of the Constitution that vests all "executive Power" in "a President" rather than in multiple officials or Congress. In a June 26, 2007 letter to Senator John Kerry, Addington asserted that by virtue of Executive Order 12958 as amended in 2003, the Office of the Vice President was exempt from oversight by the National Archives' Information Security Oversight Office for its handling of classified materials, which President George W. Bush confirmed to be the correct interpretation of his revised order. He had previously pushed for elimination of a presidentially-mandated position (as opposed to at the option of the Archivist) of director of the oversight office after a dispute over oversight of classified information. The story was broken after the Chicago Tribune noticed an asterisk in an ISOO report "that it contained no information from OVP". Although a federal district judge initially ordered Addington to submit to a deposition in a lawsuit filed to protect Cheney's vice-presidential records from potential destruction under the provisions of the Presidential Records Act of 1978, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit overruled the federal district judge and held that Addington did not have to submit to the deposition.

Addington, along with other officials, was mentioned by title in I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby Jr.'s indictment for five felony charges related to the Plame affair, regarding the leak of the identity of a CIA officer, and he testified at the Libby trial. A PBS Frontline documentary "Cheney's Law" broadcast on October 16, 2007 detailed Addington's key role in Bush administration policy making, and noted that he declined to be interviewed regarding his thoughts on the limits of executive privilege. On June 26, 2008, Addington appeared to testify under subpoena from the House Judiciary Committee along with former Justice Department attorney John Yoo in a contentious hearing on detainee treatment, interrogation methods and the extent of executive branch authority.video This testimony was Addington's only public statement during his eight years as Cheney's vice presidential counsel and chief of staff.