David Addington
11th Chief of Staff to the Vice President of the United States
In office 2005 – 2009
Vice President	Dick Cheney
Preceded by	Scooter Libby
Succeeded by	Ron Klain
Born	January 22, 1957
Alma mater	Georgetown University B.S.F.S. Duke Law School J.D.

David Spears Addington (b. January 22, 1957, Washington, D.C.), was legal counsel (2001–2005) and chief of staff (2005–2009) to former Vice President Dick Cheney .^[1] During 21 years of federal service, Addington has worked at the CIA, the Reagan White House, the Department of Defense, four congressional committees, and the Cheney Office of the Vice President.^[2] He was appointed to replace I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby Jr. as Cheney's chief of staff upon Libby's resignation when Libby was indicted on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice on October 28, 2005.^[3] Addington was described by U.S. News & World Report as "the most powerful man you've never heard of."^[4]

Contents 1 Family 2 Education and career 3 Vice President's office 4 Spanish charges considered 5 Records 6 References 7 External links

[edit] Family

Addington is the son of Eleanore and the late Jerry Addington, a retired brigadier general and West Point graduate.^[5] He is married to Cynthia Mary Addington; the couple have three children. Previously, Addington had been married to Linda Werling, whom he met while the two were both attending Duke University.^[6]

[edit] Education and career

Addington graduated from Sandia High School in Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1974. He was admitted to United States Naval Academy at Annapolis and attended beginning in Fall 1974, but did not graduate. He is a graduate of the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University (B.S.F.S., summa cum laude) and holds a J.D. (with honors) from Duke University School of Law.^[7] He was admitted to the bar in 1981.

Addington was an assistant general counsel for the Central Intelligence Agency from 1981 to 1984.^[8] From 1984 to 1987 he was counsel for the House committees on intelligence and foreign affairs. He served as a staff attorney on the joint U.S. House-Senate committee investigation of the Iran-Contra scandal as an assistant to Congressman Bill Broomfield (R-MI). Although books and news articles have said that he was one of the principal authors of a controversial minority report issued at the conclusion of the joint committee's investigation,^[9] Addington had left the committee's service before the minority report was written and had no role in it.^[10]

Addington was also a special assistant for legislative affairs to President Ronald Reagan for one year in 1987, before becoming Reagan's deputy assistant. From 1989 to 1992, Addington served as special assistant to Cheney who was then the Secretary of Defense, before being appointed by President George H. W. Bush and confirmed by the Senate as the Department of Defense's general counsel in 1992.^[11] In 1993 and 1994, Addington was the Republican staff director of the Senate Intelligence Committee. In 1994 and 1995, he headed a political action committee, the Alliance for American Leadership, set up to support Republican candidates for public office, such as Cheney.

From 1995 to 2001, he worked in private practice, for law firms Baker, Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell & Berkowitz and Holland & Knight, and the American Trucking Association.^[12]

[edit] Vice President's office

As Counsel to the Vice President, Addington's duties involved protecting the legal interests of the institution of the Vice Presidency. As Chief of Staff, he supervised the Vice President's staff. In both roles, Addington also provided advice to the White House staff. As Counsel, Addington is known for his focus on the constitutional independence of the Vice Presidency, including in the context of federal lawsuits to prevent incursions into the inner workings of the Office of the Vice President by the Government Accountability Office and private organizations.^[13] After he began working for Vice President Cheney, Addington was very influential in many different areas of policy. He provided advice and drafted memoranda on many of the most controversial policies of the Bush administration.^[4] Addington's influence strongly reflects his hawkish views on U.S. foreign policy, a position he had apparently already committed to as a teenager during the late phase of the Vietnam War in the early 1970s.^[14] Addington testified that he applied three filters in formulating advice on the War on Terror: (i) comply with the Constitution, (ii) within the law, maximize the President's options, and (iii) ensure legal protection of military and intelligence personnel engaged in counterterrorism activities.^[15]

Addington has consistently advocated that under the Constitution, the President has substantial and expansive powers as commander-in-chief during wartime.^[16] He is the legal force behind over 750 signing statements that President George W. Bush issued when signing bills passed by Congress, expanding the practice relative to other Presidents.^{[17][self-published source?][18][self-published source?]} Charlie Savage, the former national legal affairs writer for The Boston Globe who won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on signing statements, quotes former associate White House counsel Brad Berenson saying that Addington "would dive into a 200-page bill like it was a four-course meal" as he crafted the statements.^[19][20]

Press reports have alleged that Addington helped to shape an August 2002 opinion from the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) that said torture might be justified in some cases,^[21] although a senior official with firsthand knowledge of the matter has stated that the notion that Addington "had a hand in drafting Justice Department legal opinions in the war on terrorism" is "so erroneous as to be laughable."^[22] Press reports also state that Addington reportedly took a leading role in pressing for the use of harsh interrogation methods when a delegation of top Bush administration attorneys traveled to the Guantanamo Bay detention camp in September 2002 to observe operations there,^[23], although Addington has contradicted this in sworn testimony.^[24] In congressional testimony, Addington has emphasized that "people out in the field, particularly the folks at the CIA, would not have engaged in their conduct and the head of the CIA would not have ordered them to engage in that conduct without knowing that the Attorney General of the United States or his authorized designee, which is what OLC is, has said this is lawful and they relied on that." ^[25] The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released a narrative concerning the Office of Legal Counsel opinions on interrogations on April 17, 2009.^[26]

Some press reports indicate that Addington advocated scaling back the authority of lawyers in the uniformed services; Addington in fact advocated merely that the civilian general counsels of the military departments be recognized as the chief legal officers of those departments.^[27]

Shortly after September 26, 2002, a Gulfstream jet carrying Addington, Alberto Gonzales, John Rizzo, William Haynes II, two Justice Department lawyers, Alice S. Fisher and Patrick F. Philbin, and the Office of Legal Counsel's Jack Goldsmith flew to Camp Delta to view the facility that held enemy combatants, including Mohammed al-Kahtani, then to Charleston, South Carolina to view the facility that held enemy combatants, including Jose Padilla, and finally to Norfolk, Virginia, where they briefly viewed an enemy combatant on a videoscreen display.^[28][29]

In November 2006, the German government received a complaint seeking the prosecution of Addington and 15 other current and former U.S. government officials for alleged war crimes.^[30] The German Prosecutor General at the Federal Supreme Court declined to initiate proceedings on the complaint.^[31]

According to Harvard Law School professor Jack Goldsmith, the head of the Office of Legal Counsel from 2003 to 2004, Addington once said that "we're one bomb away from getting rid of that obnoxious court," referring to the secret United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which oversees clandestine wiretapping. ^[32] Goldsmith also noted that Addington was speaking sarcastically at the time.^[33] Washington Post reporter Barton Gellman writes that Addington was the author of the controlling legal and technical documents for the Bush administration's warrantless surveillance program, typing the documents on a Tempest-shielded computer across from his desk in room 268 of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building and storing them in a vault in his office.^[34]

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell is alleged to have remarked in private, regarding who was responsible for the NSA wiretapping of U.S. citizens without a warrant: "It's Addington," and further, that "he doesn't care about the Constitution." ^[35] when speaking with friends at a Washington Redskins game. Jack Goldsmith has written that if Powell indeed made this remark, "he was wrong," as Addington and Cheney "seemed to care passionately about the Constitution as they understood it."^[36] Further, it is alleged, at least during Cheney's term as Secretary of Defense from 1989-93, that Addington and Cheney were deeply and eagerly interested in the U.S. Continuity of Operations Plan ^[37] (CO-OP), to be used in the event of a nuclear attack on the U.S. (and first partially implemented after 9/11/01). This plan is alleged to provide "enduring Constitutional government" under a "paramount unitary executive" with "cooperation from" Congress and the several Courts. This deep and eager interest in the CO-OP was reported by the New Yorker^[38] to extend to drills where Cheney spent his nights in a bunker, perhaps that "secure undisclosed location" which he was said to occupy following 9/11. Apparently Addington has taken this interest to the point where "For years, Addington has carried a copy of the U.S. Constitution in his pocket; taped onto the back are photocopies of extra statutes that detail the legal procedures for Presidential succession in times of national emergency..."^[39] perhaps, even a national emergency that involves the CO-OP. Given that the Vice President is first in the line of succession in the event of a Presidential death, whether due to disaster or natural causes,^[40], it is common^{[weasel words]} for advisers^[which?] to the Vice President to be familiar with such matters^{[original research?]}.

Although press reports state that Addington consistently advocated the expansion of presidential powers and the unitary executive theory, a nearly absolute deference to the executive branch from Congress and the judiciary, Addington has stated that he intends the term "unitary executive" to refer to the provision of the Constitution that vests all "executive Power" in "a President" rather than in multiple officials or Congress.^[41] In a June 26, 2007 letter to Senator John Kerry, Addington asserted that by virtue of Executive Order 12958 as amended in 2003, the Office of the Vice President was exempt from oversight by the National Archives' Information Security Oversight Office for its handling of classified materials,^[42] which President George W. Bush confirmed to be the correct interpretation of his revised order.^[43] He had previously pushed for elimination of a presidentially-mandated position (as opposed to at the option of the Archivist) of director of the oversight office after a dispute over oversight of classified information.^[44] The story was broken after the Chicago Tribune noticed an asterisk in an ISOO report "that it contained no information from OVP". Although a federal district judge initially ordered Addington to submit to a deposition in a lawsuit filed to protect Cheney's vice-presidential records from potential destruction under the provisions of the Presidential Records Act of 1978,^{[45] [46]} the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit overruled the federal district judge and held that Addington did not have to submit to the deposition.^[47]

Addington, along with other officials, was mentioned by title in I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby Jr.'s indictment for five felony charges related to the Plame affair, regarding the leak of the identity of a CIA officer,^[48], and he testified at the Libby trial.^[49] A PBS Frontline documentary "Cheney's Law" broadcast on October 16, 2007 detailed Addington's key role in Bush administration policy making, and noted that he declined to be interviewed regarding his thoughts on the limits of executive privilege.^[50]

On June 26, 2008, Addington appeared to testify under subpoena from the House Judiciary Committee along with former Justice Department attorney John Yoo in a contentious hearing on detainee treatment, interrogation methods and the extent of executive branch authority.^{[51][52][53]video}

[edit] Spanish charges considered

In March 2009 Baltasar Garzón, a Spanish judge who has considered international war crimes charges against other high-profile figures, considered whether to allow charges made by Gonzalo Boye, a convicted MIR/ETA terrorist collaborator,^[54] to be laid against Addington and five other former officials of the George W. Bush Presidency.^[55] Judge Garzon did not dismiss the complaint, but instead ordered the complaint assigned by lottery to another judge, who will then decide whether to pursue the complaint or not.^[56] Spanish Attorney General Candido Conde-Pumpido "strongly criticized" the proceedings, labeling them a legal "artifice."^[57] Pumpido recommended against prosecution due to lack of material responsibility on the part of the American officials.^[58]

[edit] Records

The Vice Presidential records created or obtained by David S. Addington during his service as Counsel to the Vice President and Chief of Staff to the Vice President from 2001 to 2009 are preserved and maintained by the Archivist of the United States at the National Archives under the law.^[59]

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• "Pushing the Limit on Presidential Powers," by Barton Gellman and Jo Becker, The Washington Post, Monday, June 25, 2007
• "The Hidden Power," by Jane Mayer, profile of David Addington in the July 3, 2006, issue of The New Yorker magazine.
• The New Yorker magazine Q&A with Jane Mayer about her David Addington article
• Fresh Air with Terry Gross interview of Jane Mayer about her David Addington article July 5, 2006
• David Addington's campaign contributions
• 'Democracy Now!' coverage of Addingtion's appointment as chief of staff for Vice-President Dick Cheney and his role in the expansion of presidential power
• Meet David Addington: Cheney's Guy
• "50 Most Powerful People in D.C.", GQ Magazine, August, 2007
• December 12, 2002 letter from Addington as OVP general counsel to operator of parody website
• The Man Behind the Torture, New York Review of Books, Volume 54, Number 19, December 6, 2007.
• Madness and Shame, New York Times, July 22, 2008.

Political offices
Preceded by I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby Jr.	Chief of Staff to the Vice President of the United States 2005–2009	Succeeded by Ronald Klain