Addington was an assistant general counsel for the
Central Intelligence Agency from 1981 to 1984. From 1984 to 1987 he was counsel for the
House committees on
intelligence and
foreign affairs. He served as a staff attorney on for
congressional committees investigating the Iran–Contra affair as an assistant to Congressman
Bill Broomfield (R-MI). 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, which "defended
President Reagan by claiming it was 'unconstitutional for Congress to pass laws intruding' on the 'commander in chief.'" but in his opening remarks as he testified under
subpoena before the
House Judiciary Committee, Addington said that he had left the committee's service before the minority report was written and had no role in it. 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. 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, with a principal focus on being a presidential exploratory committee for Cheney, as the former Defense Secretary contemplated running for the 1996 Republican presidential nomination. From 1995 to 2001, he worked in private practice, for law firms
Baker Donelson and
Holland & Knight, and the
American Trucking Associations. He also provided extensive assistance to Dick Cheney when the latter was chief executive officer of
Halliburton and was in charge of
vetting potential presidential running mates for the
George W. Bush 2000 presidential campaign, before he was officially his party's nominee for the White House and surprised political observers by choosing Cheney himself to be his running mate.
Bush administration on September 11, 2001, following the
September 11 attacks greeting Addington in the Presidential Palace in
Kabul in February 2007 As counsel to the vice president, Addington's duties involved protecting the legal interests of the Office of the Vice President. Although limited duties have been given under the Constitution, each vice president has a role in association with the president. As chief of staff, Addington supervised the vice president's staff. In both roles, Addington also provided advice to the White House staff, as he had the additional role of
Assistant to the President, as his predecessor
Scooter Libby had likewise held. As vice presidential counsel, Addington is known for his focus on the constitutional independence of the vice president. He tried to protect the inner workings of the Office of the Vice President from investigations by the
Government Accountability Office (GAO) and private organizations. After he began working for Cheney, Addington was influential in multiple policy areas. He provided advice and drafted memoranda on a number of the most controversial policies of the
Bush administration. In his House Judiciary Committee testimony, Addington said 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. 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.
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. A declassified CIA congressional briefing memo of February 4, 2003 states "The (CIA) General Counsel described the process by which the (enhanced interrogation) techniques were approved by a bevy of lawyers from the NSC, the Vice President’s office and the Justice Department," which makes it likely that Addington was aware of the coercive methods if not one or more of the "
torture memos" as well, although it is not clear exactly what the CIA memo meant by the word 'approved' as none of the lawyers mentioned was in the chain of command that approves CIA operations and the White House-level lawyers relied on Justice Department legal opinions rather than developing and issuing legal opinions of their own. 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, although
John Yoo, author of a number of the "
Torture Memos", dismissed the notion of Addington's authorship of Department of Justice memos as "so erroneous as to be laughable." US Army Colonel
Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as Colin Powell's chief of staff when he was
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—at the same time Addington was Cheney's personal counsel as Secretary of Defense—and then later when Powell was
Secretary of State, stated in an in-depth interview regarding extraordinary measures taken post 9/11: "The man who, to me, brings all of this together more than Cheney himself, because he has one foot in the legal camp—and I must admit it's a fairly brilliant foot—and he has one foot in the operator camp, that's David Addington." Press reports also state that Addington reportedly took a leading role in pressing for the use of torture (so-called "
enhanced interrogation techniques") for interrogations when a delegation of top Bush administration attorneys traveled to the
Guantanamo Bay detention camp in September 2002 to observe operations there, although Addington said that he could not recall this in his sworn
House Judiciary Committee testimony. The 6,700-page
Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture, released in 2016, found the use of torture was both ineffective for gathering intelligence and had damaged America's standing in the world. 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. Shortly after September 26, 2002, a
Gulfstream jet carrying Addington,
Alberto Gonzales, CIA attorney
John A. 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-Qahtani, then to
Charleston, South Carolina, to view the facility that held enemy combatants, including
José Padilla, and finally to
Norfolk, Virginia, where they briefly viewed an enemy combatant on a videoscreen display. In November 2006, the German government received a complaint seeking the prosecution of Addington and 15 other current and former US government officials for alleged war crimes. The German
Prosecutor General at the Federal Supreme Court declined to initiate proceedings on the complaint. According to
Harvard Law School professor
Jack Goldsmith, who headed 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. Goldsmith also noted that Addington was speaking sarcastically at the time. 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." It is alleged, at least during Cheney's term as
secretary of defense from 1989 to 1993, that Addington and Cheney were deeply and eagerly interested in the
Continuity of Operations Plan which President
George W. Bush confirmed to be the correct interpretation of his revised order. 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. 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, 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. 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, and he testified at the Libby trial. 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. 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. This testimony was Addington's only public statement during his eight years as Cheney's vice presidential counsel and chief of staff.
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 to be laid against Addington and five other former officials of the George W. Bush presidency. 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. Spanish Attorney General
Cándido Conde-Pumpido "strongly criticized" the proceedings, labeling them a legal "artifice." Conde-Pumpido recommended against prosecution due to lack of material responsibility on the part of the American officials.
Later career On April 13, 2013, Addington was on a list released by the
Russian Federation of Americans banned from entering the country over their alleged
human rights violations. The list was a direct response to the so-called
Magnitsky list revealed by the United States the day before. Addington worked as group vice president for research at
The Heritage Foundation and as senior vice president, general counsel, and chief legal officer at the
National Federation of Independent Business. == Personal life ==