HomeLeading The News Democrats question credibility, consistency of DNI McConnell
Leading The News
Democrats question credibility, consistency of DNI McConnell
By Helen Fessenden
Posted: 09/25/07 07:11 PM [ET]
As spy chief Mike McConnell faces another round of grilling on the Hill Tuesday to defend the new White House-backed surveillance law, Democrats are homing in on some of his recent public statements that have appeared imprecise, incorrect or contradictory.
McConnell faces the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, following appearances last week before the House Intelligence and Judiciary committees and the previous week before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. As director of national intelligence (DNI), he is leading the administration’s push to make permanent the temporary surveillance law that Congress hurriedly passed in early August.
Democrats on the Intelligence and Judiciary panels are working on an alternative bill that they plan to introduce in October.
The interim bill amended the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) by authorizing the administration to conduct warrantless eavesdropping of foreign targets whether or not they were communicating with Americans, as long as the target is “reasonably believed” to be abroad. Under FISA, a secret court had to issue warrants if the communications involved anyone within U.S. borders, whereas the new law required that the DNI and the attorney general authorize the warrantless wiretapping. For its part, the FISA court may only conduct a procedural review after the fact. Democrats want to restore the court’s role as the exclusive authority in granting warrants for foreign-intelligence gathering inside U.S. borders.
McConnell, who had started his term this past winter with generally strong reviews, has seen some of his political capital erode in the wake of stumbles during recent testimony.
For example, McConnell told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on Sept. 10 that the new law helped Germany disrupt a major terrorist plot on Sept. 2. After Democrats and others pointed out that the U.S.-German intelligence cooperation he was referring to occurred last year, well before the bill’s passage, he retracted that statement the next day.
His statements, taken together, have left open other gaps that Democrats have seized on. In an August interview with The El Paso Times and in subsequent testimony, he said that it took 200 man-hours on average for the FISA Court to issue a warrant for each application in 2006, as part of his argument that the traditional application process was cumbersome.
But that estimate was at odds with testimony before the House Intelligence Committee on Sept. 18 by James Baker, former counsel to the Justice Department’s Office of Intelligence Policy and Review, which oversees the FISA Court. Baker stated that the process could be as quick as minutes in “no-kidding” emergencies.
“It’s done in hours, it’s done in the same day, it’s done as fast as they tell us [they need it],” said Baker, who held that post for seven years until this past January.
At another hearing that same day with the House Judiciary panel, Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) noted that if the 200-hours estimate were correct, it would have required 436,000 man-hours by the FISA Court for all the recorded warrants it issued in 2006. Nadler, panel Chairman John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) and Rep. Robert “Bobby” Scott (D-Va.) had sent a Sept. 11 letter to McConnell asking whether the DNI still stood by that number.
“Your response, which we received this morning, frankly evaded that question and simply asserted that your point was that significant resources shouldn’t be devoted to FISA applications,” charged Nadler.
McConnell offered yet another number during testimony before the House Intelligence Committee on Sept. 20, when he referred to a case in which it took 12, not 200, hours to get a warrant involving a U.S. soldier captured by Iraqi insurgents. Republicans seized on that case as an example of a warrant taking too long.
“The DNI stands by his comments that, on the summary level, it takes 200 hours to review each FISA Court application,” said McConnell spokesman Ross Feinstein in an interview Monday.
McConnell has also offered differing statements on how much intelligence the United States would lose if Congress does not make permanent the interim law. At the Senate Homeland Security hearing, he said the U.S. would lose “50 percent of its ability to track” terrorists, but then upped that estimate to “two-thirds” when he spoke before the House Judiciary panel the following week.
“The general point is that we would lose out on a significant amount of intelligence,” said spokesman Feinstein when asked about the discrepancy.
Democrats have questioned McConnell’s commitment during the negotiations over the Democratic FISA bill that he ultimately turned down in August, before Congress passed the GOP alternative. In the El Paso Times interview, he said he hadn’t read the six-page Democratic draft bill. Under questioning by House Intelligence panel member Jim Langevin (D-R.I.) on Sept. 20, however, McConnell said he “personally skimmed it,” even though he “did not read it in infinite detail.” He explained that he rejected the Democratic bill on the suggestion of 20 lawyers who had already parsed the language.
Further clouding the picture, several Democratic sources say, is that McConnell had asked for, and received, three final revisions in the Democratic version before coming back to congressional negotiators with a wholly different draft — the one he deemed unacceptable.
“The DNI was straightforward with both sides in what we needed in the FISA modernization bill,” countered spokesman Feinstein.
House Intelligence Committee member Rush Holt (D-N.J.) openly addressed the issue of credibility at the Sept. 20 hearing, and suggested that McConnell’s image as an honest broker between the White House and Congress has been tarnished.
“You have to keep a certain distance from that power to whom you have to speak the truth,” said Holt. “And that’s why it concerns me that when you talked about the lawyers who were working to prepare this legislation back in August, when you made some of the statements that you made, they clearly seem to be influenced by lawyers in power, in the White House, in the vice president’s office.”
