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.
Ping.
Well... don’t call me “Shirley”.
Thank you...
OK, since both the CIA and State Dept are Executive branch ...
how did they figure this a violation of separation of powers?
So... Is Shirley another Muslim convert, or is she just a run of the mill globalist communist?
Inquiry by C.I.A. Affirms It Spied on Senate Panel
These Senators Just Asked Obama to Make the CIA Apologize for Spying on the Intelligence Committee
This Feinstein Report came up the other day while I was digging around on something else... had to do with Farhadian;
(snip) An embattled former Obama administration appointee — who was part of a group of attorneys accused of being terrorist sympathizers for defending “enemy combatants” — has been hired for a post at the US Attorney’s Office in Brooklyn, officials confirmed today. Tali Farhadian was one of several private attorneys who created a rift between Republicans last spring when the Obama Administration assigned them to posts within the Justice Department.
...Farhadian, 35, served as counsel to Holder until her departure in June. Before joining Holder’s office, Farhadian worked on a team at a law firm that wrote legal briefs for two organizations, Human Rights Watch and Human Rights First, which were representing Ali Saleh Kahlah Al-Marri. The Qatari student, who had been designated an enemy combatant, was to stand trial later on fraud charges in Illinois.... -———————— ‘Qaeda 7’ attorney gets NYC job: Fed prosecutor gig (’Terrorist sympathizer’) The New York Post ^ | January 8, 2011 | Michael Maddux http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2654019/posts Posted by 2ndDivisionVet
Shirley, you can’t be series. . .
That makes more sense ... without my glasses on, it looked like state rather than senate.
Yes, Shirley, series and Hugh too. :D
Tali Farhadian is a JINO who in 2010 married a guy named Boaz Weinstein ... he is derivatives trader and hedge fund manager and founder of Saba Capital Management. Tali was born in Iran to a Jewish family that fled the fall of the Shah in 1979... -—paraphrased from Wiki
Weinstein created Saba with Deutsche Bank around the time Obama took office.
More like summer 2009... though it had been in the works for a while... and it took off.
Farhadian was an “al Qaeda 7” defense attorney securing the transfer of detainees to Qatar.
Sounds like a typical Obama appointee.
Psst, Mr. CIA man, the problem is at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
Because Congress ... if they ever defended it, have statutory authority over over agencies.
yea, 6 weeks later a new IG report from the CIA comes out and say’s Hillary made mistakes, but not criminal.
The particularly galling thing abut the al Qaeda 7 release of detainees was that the release included al Marri , and Al-Marri is a Qatari citizen who acted as a sleeper agent in Illinois for one or more planned follow-on attacks.
He’d been nabbed on credit card fraud among other things... but when searching his home the Feds took a very keen interest in a certain trunk that he had which earlier had been shipped to him from overseas.
The al Marris had also received in a shipment what they claimed were “seeds,” perhaps in this same trunk.
Al Marri’s boss was KSM.
KSM was the not very religious party animal who was captured in the home of a Pakistani bacteriologist named Qadoos... who was in turn associated with Qadeer Khan’s proliferation network.
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