Make him come clean, Mr. President.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein's
broadside against the CIA Tuesday, in which she said the agency might have illegally spied on the Senate Intelligence Committee, and accused it of cover-ups, intimidation and smears aimed at the committee's investigators of the Bush-era torture program, has rocked Washington, and is shaping up to be a war between Congress and the agency. For his part, CIA Director (and Bush torture ignorer) John Brennan
denies the allegations without directly addressing them.
Mr. Brennan rejected accusations that the CIA hacked into the Senate computers in Virginia, but he didn't directly address the question of improper searches.
"When the facts come out on this, I think a lot of people who are claiming that there has been this tremendous sort of spying and monitoring and hacking will be proved wrong," he said before an audience at the Council of Foreign Relations, where he was being interviewed by NBC's Andrea Mitchell.
Mr. Brennan expressed confidence the CIA would be absolved of any wrongdoing. Should the investigations expose any wrongdoing at the agency, Mr. Brennan said, he would take the findings to President Barack Obama and let the president decide whether to keep him on as director.
If Brennan has his way, the facts won't come out. Witness the
lengths to which his agency has gone to keep the torture report—the issue at the heart of this dispute—from being declassified. Brennan and his agency will fight tooth and nail to cover up the agency's efforts to spy on, to intimidate and to thwart the Senate Intelligence Committee's work, as well.
As Meteor Blades says, one immediate answer to this dispute is for President Obama to direct the declassification and the release of the committee's intelligence report. The black eye the agency gets as a result of that release will be nothing to compare to the black eye they get as this gets blown up into a full constitutional crisis.