NPR- Judicial Watch successfully sued for the Clinton Healthcare records

[underpants]

http://www.npr.org/features/feature.php?wfId=1852861
Audio link above. NPR pointed out this morning that the very same Judicial Watch that is suing for the Cheney Energy task force records also sued to find out who Hillary Clinton consulted with and about what back when they were formulating their health care proposal.

ALSO- It seems that this goes all the way back to George Washington's administration.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0131/p02s01-uspo.htm
"What's bizarre is not just that the executive branch has staked out a fairly extreme separation-of-powers point of view, but they seem to be looking for fights to pick about it," says Peter Shane, a professor of law and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pa. "Unless they're covering something up, this is an odd thing to go to the mat over."

Fights between the president and Congress over access to information are nothing new, of course. As far back as 1792, George Washington tried to withhold documents about a disastrous military campaign - the so-called St. Clair incident - from Congress. In that case, the president finally relented, in order to exonerate officials who were being accused of wrongdoing.

"Washington wanted to establish the principle that a president has the right to withhold information from Congress," says Mark Rozell, a professor of politics at Catholic University here. "But he made it very clear in his correspondence that a president may only do that when it's in the public's interest - not just to save the administration from embarrassment."

The relevant law in this case is the Federal Advisory Committee Act, which requires all policy meetings with outside advisers to be open, to avoid the appearance of deals being cut with lobbyists behind closed doors. The GAO and other critics contend that the vice president's energy task force should be subject to these rules. It's asking for basic information regarding "who asked whom about what, when, where - and how much did it cost," says Jeff Nelligan, a GAO spokesman.

But the White House says that the GAO is overreaching its legal authority in demanding this information from the vice president. In many ways, the situation is similar to that involving former first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton's task force on healthcare, say critics. "When had secret meetings and refused to provide documents about that, conservatives and Republicans were up in arms - and they should be equally up in arms about what Vice President Cheney is doing," says Larry Klayman, head of Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group that is also suing the administration to get access to the energy task force documents. Mrs. Clinton eventually backed down.