White House redactions on tanker lease deal report raise ire

When White House officials took a pen to the Pentagon inspector general's latest report on the Air Force's ill-fated deal to lease a new fleet of aerial refueling tankers from Boeing, they were guided by an informal agreement reached last summer by Senate Republican leaders and President Bush's top legal adviser.

Leaders on the Senate Armed Services Committee, however, are not satisfied the administration stuck by that agreement -- in either its dealings with the committee or with the inspector general -- and was too liberal in its redactions of e-mails and other information pertaining to the contentious lease proposal.

The agreement, reviewed Wednesday by CongressDaily, was the product of a July 2004 meeting between Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., Armed Services Committee Chairman John Warner, R-Va., Armed Services Airland Subcommittee Chairman John McCain, R-Ariz., and then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, now the attorney general.

The agreement allows the administration to redact references to senior White House personnel and lawmakers in documents available to congressional staffers. In turn, members of Congress could review privately the names of any lawmakers identified in thousands of documents pertaining to the lease.

During the meeting, Gonzales and the three senators also agreed to strike any references to the OMB director and deputy director from correspondence or other documents. The administration, in turn, could not redact the names of many other Defense and White House officials and must provide to Congress all relevant Defense Science Board and Defense Policy Board documents.

The meeting came after McCain contacted the Pentagon 11 times to receive information on the tanker deal, and recommended issuing a subpoena, according to documents. Warner, however, favored a compromise with the White House over a subpoena, a tactic rarely invoked by the committee.

But in the months following, much of the information sent to Congress included heavy redactions that did not meet the terms of the agreement, pushing McCain to meet with Gonzales several more times throughout the summer and fall of 2004.

For instance, the administration redacted almost all of the February 2002 testimony of then-Air Force Secretary James Roche before the Senate Armed Services Committee. The document, a public file, was earmarked for lawmaker review only.

"Unfortunately, the DoD general counsel abused and misinterpreted the agreement that we had," McCain said at a Tuesday hearing on the tanker deal.

White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan said Tuesday the administration had not improperly interfered in the inspector general investigation, but rather had made all of the documents available to investigators.

Meanwhile, the inspector general report includes e-mails and names erased by White House officials, who had two weeks to review and scrub the 256-page report before it was sent to Congress.

Inspector General Joseph Schmitz was not required by law to adhere to the agreement, which governs only the release of information to Congress. However, he said Tuesday that he made an "independent decision" to respect it during the course of the investigation.

That decision has spurred opposition from some committee members, including Armed Services ranking member Carl Levin, D-Mich., who called into question Schmitz's independence.

"Regardless of any agreement that may have been reached between the White House and members of Congress ...that is one matter which is a separate matter from your report," Levin said during the hearing.

Among administration redactions are two complete e-mails from Air Force Chief of Staff John Jumper to Roche in January 2003. In other areas of the report, the names of administration and congressional officials, as well as members of Congress, are deleted.

Levin intends to follow up on the issue, a congressional aide said Wednesday. The inspector general's office would not comment further on the tanker investigation.