PRIVATE DICK: On January 20 tricky Dick Cheney will execute his plan to escape Washington with records created during his tenure as vice president--unless he's stymied by a court order. Cheney has long insisted that as president of the Senate he is not part of the executive branch. And the Bush administration has amended the Presidential Records Act (PRA)--a law passed by Congress in 1978 requiring the president and vice president to preserve and deposit their papers with the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)--in a manner that may exempt Cheney from compliance.

To prevent this history heist, the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) filed a federal lawsuit September 8 seeking an injunction against Cheney's intention to sequester eight years of government documents. I am one of seven plaintiffs, along with historian Stanley Kutler, the Organization of American Historians, the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations and others; Anne Weismann, chief counsel of CREW, is our lawyer.

In addition to seeking a judgment against Cheney's interpretation of the PRA, the lawsuit seeks a preliminary injunction requiring preservation of all documents pending resolution of the suit. Such a court order is needed in light of Cheney's clear pattern of secrecy and obfuscation. In addition to being associated with the disappearance of e-mails related to the origins of the Iraq War, he has consistently refused to allow the NARA to inspect his office for compliance with classification requirements. He has also refused to provide information, as government ethics law requires, about travel funded by outside sources. He has even refused to provide Congress with a staff directory.

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