1 Boring Old Man

noun.

1. A way of escaping a difficulty, especially an omission or ambiguity in the wording of a contract or law that provides a means of evading compliance.

David Addington, Vice President Cheney’s current Chief of Staff, has been with Cheney for decades, serving as the Chief Counsel to the defense Department when Cheney was Secretary of Defense. He assumed his current position when Scooter Libby resigned in 2005. He’s a proponent of the Unitary Executive Theory, and has been involved in drafting most of the contraversial legal positions of the Administration. When he testified at the Libby Trial, he frequently went off into meandering legal arguments guaranteed to put people to sleep. He’s a master of loophole management, and is undoubtedly behind the Vice President’s claim that the Vice Presidency is not part of the Executive Branch.

Most of his legal manipulations seem to begin with a conclusion and work their way backwards. This one is a gem. The Vice President, at around the time of the Valerie Plame leak, decided he was no longer interested in archiving his papers, so he refused to have them included in the Executive records. Addington, obsessing around with the Constitution and the Laws found him a justification for what he wanted to do. Since the Vice President in the President of the Senate, they decided the Vice President isn’t in the Executive Branch and didn’t have to obey those requirements.Addington, likewise found ways to justify torture, invalidate Congress with Presidential Singing Statements, any and all kinds of secrecy, just about anything the Vice President sets his mind to.  He’s one of those lawyers who apparently delights in poring through legalese to find loopholes to evade the laws as written.