Nearing the end of eight years as Vice President, Dick Cheney bluntly dismissed the frequent suggestion that he was the one calling the shots in the White House. “It’s an urban legend,” he said. “It never happened.” […]No wonder he's denying he had a hand in the stovepiping of Iraqi intelligence before the war and the pressuring of analysts and shutting up the Army War College with Rumsfeld's help. The PNAC neocon plan for war turned out so well...
“This whole notion that somehow I exceeded my authority here, was usurping his authority, was simply not true.” Cheney said “there was never any question about who was in charge: it was George Bush and that’s how we operated.”
Think Progress lists a few "legends":
Next he'll be telling us his undisclosed secret location is a castle in Transylvania....Here are just some examples of Cheney abusing his vice presidential powers:
– Argued he was not part of the executive branch but instead a “barnacle” hanging between the legislative and executive branch.
– Cheney’s office failed to provide data on its classification and declassification activities as required by Executive Order 12958. “Cheney’s office provided the information in 2001 and 2002, then stopped.”
– Top Cheney aide David Addington “typed a substitute signature line” for Alberto Gonzales on a memo re-authorizing Bush’s illegal wiretapping program.
– “The Cheney team had…technological supremacy over the National Security Council staff. That is to say, they could read their e-mails,” said former Colin Powell aide Lawrence Wilkerson.
– Documents prepared for the then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice were “routed outside the formal process” to Cheney.
– A Cheney lawyer told the Secret Service in September 2006 “to eliminate data on who visited Cheney at his official residence.”
