When New York City speechwriter and journalist Zac Frank worked at Colorado College’s library, he came across an “unusual” student thesis written by Elizabeth Cheney, one of former Vice President Dick Cheney’s daughters. For Slate, Frank writes that Cheney’s 125-page treatise, “The Evolution of Presidential War Powers,” written when her father was Wyoming’s sole U.S. representative, seemed a symbolic “first legal memorandum of the Bush administration.”

The thesis surprisingly lays out some of the same arguments that would later justify wiretapping of American citizens, extraordinary rendition, and other controversial policies. The left-leaning Washington Independent balks at the story, writing that Elizabeth Cheney’s senior undergraduate thesis “tells you nothing at all about the Bush presidency.”

Meanwhile, at The Atlantic, Andrew Sullivan is fascinated by what Cheney, an attorney who went on to hold influential government positions, wrote.