By Jason Leopold

t r u t h o u t | Investigative Report

In-depth investigation shows how Vice President Dick Cheney pressured federal energy regulators to conceal evidence of widespread market manipulation by energy companies during the California electricity crisis in 2001.

In March 2001, while California’s two largest utilities were teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, and the state’s electricity crisis was spiraling out of control, Vice President Dick Cheney summoned Curt Hebert, the chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), to his office next to the White House for a hastily arranged meeting.

Cheney had just been informed by his longtime friend Thomas Cruikshank, the man who handpicked the vice president to succeed him at Halliburton in the mid-1990s, that federal energy regulators were close to completing an investigation into allegations that Tulsa, Oklahoma-based Williams Companies and AES Corporation of Arlington, Virginia had created an artificial power shortage in California in April and May of 2000 by shutting down a power plant for more than two weeks.

Cruikshank was a member of Williams’s board of directors, and perhaps more importantly, had been one of many energy industry insiders advising Cheney’s energy task force on a wide-range of policy issues, including deregulation of the nation’s electricity sector, that would benefit Williams financially.

(Original Article)