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American Morning

Is Enron the Next Watergate?

Aired February 08, 2002 - 09:10   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
PAULA ZAHN, CNN ANCHOR: Now back to the big question of this hour: Is Enron the next Watergate? As a corporate scandal, Enron has it all: secret partnerships, inflated profits, inflated egos. Even though Congress threatens to sue the White House over records of contacts with Enron, it has yet to become a full-blown political scandal. But former Nixon White House counsel John Dean suggests Enron could be another Watergate.

In a recent article, he writes, "Not since Richard Nixon stiffed the Congress during the Watergate has a White House so openly and arrogantly defied Congress' investigative authority. Nor has any activity by the Bush administration more strongly suggested they are hiding incriminating information about their relationship with the now-moribund Enron, or other heavy-hitting campaign contributors from the energy business."

And John Dean now joins us early from Los Angeles.

Welcome. Good to see you.

JOHN DEAN, WHITE HOUSE COUNSEL: Good morning. Thank you.

ZAHN: So what do you know that Congressional investigators don't know about any culpability on the Bush administration's part?

DEAN: I don't know anything they don't know. What I do know and what's evident to me as somebody who's been there, done that, if you will, is the way this is being handled by the White House right now on request for very simple and nondetailed information at all about Vice President Cheney's energy group. I don't understand, frankly, why he's taken this hard-line stance that he has. It's very difficult for me to accept that it's a matter of principle, because he will take a lot of heat for the position he's in, and he's ultimately, I think, going to lose in court, and people are going to say, hey, what is going on here?

ZAHN: As you know, the vice president has made it abundantly clear that he feels these request erode executive privilege. Let's quickly replay an interview that our own John King did with him just a weekend ago.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DICK CHENEY, VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: This is about the ability of future presidents and vice presidents to do their job. And they've always had the capacity in the past to get honest, unvarnished advice, to have people come in and speak the truth without fear that what they say will appear on the front page of newspapers the next morning. And we need to preserve that principle.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ZAHN: And why don't you think that principle should be preserved?

DEAN: Well, Paula, with all due respect to the vice president, what GAO is asking for is not the unvarnished statements of anybody to the president or the vice president. They're merely asking for who met with that committee and where they met and their names, and this name, ranks and serial number. It's not the content of the conversations even involved. So there's even a misrepresentation going on as to what's requested. Not only that, but they're denying that the GAO has authority they've had for 80 years to request this kind of information. This raises questions in my mind.

ZAHN: Do you have a problem with Vice President Cheney and members of his staff having met with people from the energy business?

DEAN: Not at all. They certainly have a right to do that. What they don't have a right to do is, one, is to do it in a illegal fashion, if you will, and that illegal fashion is, if indeed the industry was involved in his task force, then there's a law that applies that. It's called the Federal Advisory Committee Act. It's been in commission since 1972, and it's there so outsiders can see what kind of advice is going in to making a policy. It's a very fundamental law, and it's one that we can't even tell if it was honored or not, although the vice president's office said it was not. It intentionally set up the committee not to have that kind of law apply. And we don't know, because no one will answer any questions as who did what and when.

ZAHN: Would you be satisfied if the White House just eventually offers this list of names, or do you want to know about the individual testimony of these players at these meetings?

DEAN: Well, I don't want to know any of this. I'm a spectator, but what I saying is somebody who has sat on both sides of Capitol Hill, if you will, or both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, the Congress does have a right to this kind of information. They asked for something that is noninvasive, if you will. So it really raises a lot of questions as to why the gauntlets hat been thrown at this point when it really doesn't make sense to do so. The vice president has already told the Congress that he did indeed meet with Enron, or his staff did, on at least six occasions. This is what's being asked for across the board. So why he can't give it for the others is a mystery.

ZAHN: All right. What you're saying, though, is the vice president is entitled, as is the president, to executive privilege. But you're saying the GAO is not asking to violate that, they just want the names of people who participated in these hearings. DEAN: That's right.

ZAHN: And you respect the right to right to -- the administration's right to executive privilege.

DEAN: I do, but only the president has the right to executive privilege, not the vice president. It's never gone that far. It's really a uniquely presidential privilege, and the president himself must invoke it, and there has be no invocation of executive privilege here. What they've said is, we challenge GAO's authority to even ask for this information. That's different than executive privilege. What this appears, Paula, to me to be is the first step of a cover-up. This is way you start it. You stall, you stall, you stall. You try to get something like this to go on until it is no longer an issue, until something intervenes and replaces it, or the issue becomes moot for some other reason. That's the early signal here.

ZAHN: That's a strong indictment. What suggestion is it that anything is being covered up here?

DEAN: Not an indictment at all. All I'm doing is saying if you look at the facts, and the practice. That's the way done in the past. Certainly the way we did during Watergate was to try to stall everything, and this is a stalling action.

ZAHN: John Dean, we leave it there this morning. Appreciate you getting up at this ungodly hour to join us.

Let's turn to Bill Schneider in Washington this morning. He had an opportunity to listen to some of what Mr. Dean has just said. This is a powerful charge, a charge of a potential cover-up at the White House. He's not the only one saying this. What do you make of it?

WILLIAM SCHNEIDER, CNN SR. POLITICAL ANALYST: I make of it that because it's coming from John Dean, it takes a special seriousness, because he was at the center of the Watergate controversy. He is famous for having warned President Nixon, "There's a cancer growing on the presidency." And in a sense, he's echoing and maybe reissuing that same warning here to Vice President Cheney and by implication to the president, that this has the appearance of what was done in Watergate. That was a great crime that drove a president out of office.

So this ratchets up the seriousness of the Enron controversy and the dispute between the president and Congress quite considerably.

ZAHN: Bill, help us understand something this morning. If John Dean says he respect's the president's right to executive privilege, and he just thinks the vice president should be coughing up the names of his staff and the Enron executives that attended these energy task force meetings, what could possibly be the smoking gun there in just the people list?

SCHNEIDER: He doesn't know. He says he doesn't know what the smoking gun is. All he's saying is, they're behaving as if this is covererup. That's just an implication, they're behaving as if they have something to hide. The administration says we have nothing to hide. So the question then is obvious. If they have nothing to hide, why don't they reveal this information? Congress has scaled back the scope of its request through the -- now a lawsuit from the General Accounting Office. They simply want to know the names and dates of the people that the administration spoke to. They don't want all the detailed notes of the conversation.

So to me, it's a mystery. To me, it's a mystery, to Mr. Dean, what the White House is hiding here. All he's saying is they are stalling as if this were a cover up. They are behaving the same way the Nixon White House did in my day, which was almost 30 years ago.

ZAHN: Need a brief answer to this one. Any reaction to this charge from this charge from John Dean?

SCHNEIDER: I haven't heard any. It hasn't been reported. I don't think the article has been published yet. It's at the White House.

ZAHN: Yes, it's actually on the Web page, and apparently, it's going to get published someplace this weekend. But certainly the White House has got to be concerned about the perception of this being exhibited in public polls that show the American public thinks that something is being hidden here.

SCHNEIDER: That's right, the American public definitely thinks that they're covering something up. At this point, the president is still very popular. They don't think the president did anything wrong. The most striking thing that John Dean just told you is there may be something done here illegal. He used the word "illegal." He's an attorney and that's very important coming from him. He cited an act, the Federal Advisory Committee Act, which might have been violated with the testimony of these energy executives. I haven't heard that before.

But for him to use the word "illegal" means they could be covering up law breaking, and that of course is very serious.

ZAHN: And, Bill, as you were speaking, I just learned that our producers did get in touch with the White House just moments ago, and they have no comment on this John Dean editorial.

SCHNEIDER Yes.

ZAHN: Thanks for coming in this, Bill, appreciate it.

SCHNEIDER: Pleasure. OK.

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