Posted on 06/16/2016 7:47:43 PM PDT by Fedora
President Obama on Thursday nominated a former CIA officer and longtime lawyer who examined missteps in U.S. intelligence to be the spy agency’s next inspector general, hoping to fill a position at the watchdog office that’s been vacant for more than a year.
If confirmed by the Senate, Shirley Woodward would fill the role left empty since David Buckley stepped down from in January 2015, on the heels of a landmark determination that CIA officials had gained unauthorized access to Senate computer files. Lawmakers called the episode a potential violation of constitutional separation of powers, and the spat led to one of the bitterest moments in relations between the spy agency and its congressional overseers in recent history.
In Buckley’s absence, the spy agency watchdog has been helmed by Deputy Inspector General Christopher Sharpley, who has filled the role on an acting basis.
Woodward was an intelligence operations officer at the CIA from 1985 to 1997, and later clerked for former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor
In 2004 and 2005, she was a senior lawyer on a special panel created by then-President George W. Bush to examine errors that led to the false conclusion that Iraq had acquired weapons of mass destruction before the 2003 U.S. invasion. The scathing report concluded that intelligence services had suffered “one of the most public — and most damaging — intelligence failures in recent American history.”
For the past nine years, Woodward has worked at the law firm WilmerHale.
In a statement, Obama praised her as “experienced and hardworking.”
If confirmed, Woodward would take the reins of the inspector general’s office at a time of new scrutiny.
Last month, the office revealed that Sharpley had accidentally destroyed both the digital and hard copies of a classified Senate report lambasting the CIA for its formal brutal interrogation program.
An executive summary of the 6,700-page report was made public, but the full classified version exists in just a few offices aside from Capitol Hill, which has guarded it zealously since Republicans took control of the Senate in 2015.
The apparently unintentional deletion, which occurred last summer, raised eyebrows among critics of the CIA’s past. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) — the driving force behind the 2014 report and the vice chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee — has called for the inspector general’s office to be given a new copy of the analysis, but that step appears unlikely for the time being.
CIA Director John Brennan appeared to hint at the possibility of a looming nomination while testifying on Capitol Hill earlier on Thursday.
“I like to think that I would be seen as prescient today if I were to say that such a nomination may be forthcoming soon,” he said during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing.
"I hope you'll convey back to the administration the importance that this committee puts on that position, and that we believe an appointment in the immediate future is appropriate," Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) told him in response.
Attorney General Eric Holder identified two of the attorneys in question: Principal Deputy Solicitor General Neal Katyal and National Security Division Attorney Jennifer Daskal. Katyal won the Supreme Court case Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, challenging the legality of President Bush’s military commissions; Dascal worked for Human Rights Watch.
Thanks for the links
Is there an update on this story I missed?
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