They’re sure they would win, but dropped it. They hoped to get the logs before the election, but since they didn’t…..who cares. We’ll just let someone else do it. Huh?

The Washington Post has quietly retreated from a legal battle with Vice President Cheney by dropping a lawsuit demanding Secret Service logs of visitors to his office and residence.

The newspaper’s Freedom of Information Act lawsuit prompted a flurry of press attention and court action just prior to the November election. In October, a district court judge in the capital, Ricardo Urbina, cited the looming vote when he ordered the Secret Service to comply immediately with the Post’s request. However, just six days before the election, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals issued an emergency stay blocking Judge Urbina’s order.

“We have decided not to pursue litigation further, though we believe we would have prevailed in the court of appeals as we did in the trial court,” a Post attorney, Eric Lieberman, said in an e-mail yesterday. He said the paper had “a fundamental goal” of getting the records to inform voters before the election and failed in that regard. “We also considered the fact that there are several other well positioned FOIA lawsuits seeking these same types of records, and we are confident that the public’s right of access will ultimately be vindicated in them,” Mr. Lieberman said.

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