Dick Cheney's three-decade campaign to expand presidential power is the subject here, traced from his years as a young congressman watching Watergate reshape the balance between Congress and the White House to his role as vice president after September 11. The film follows Cheney and his counsel David Addington as they draft the legal architecture behind detention without trial, coercive interrogation, and warrantless wiretapping, arguing that a wartime president needs authority beyond congressional or judicial reach. Former administration lawyers, officials, and journalists appear on camera to describe how these opinions moved from internal memos into actual policy at Guantanamo and inside the NSA, often over objections from within the Justice Department itself. The film treats Cheney not as a peripheral advisor but as the architect of a specific legal theory of the presidency, one that predates 9/11 and used the attacks as its opportunity. It closes on the unresolved fight in Congress and the courts over how much of that theory survives him.