Whew. I can't find a longer link to this yet, but in the press conference after yesterday's* Sept. 11 commission hearings, Tom Kean hit back hard at Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner's attacks on commissioner Jamie Gorelick.
"People ought to stay out of our business," the former New Jersey governor said, after dismissing Sensenbrenner's call for Gorelick's resignation as "silly." (He was responding to a question from someone representing either Sensenbrenner's election campaign or Fox News, it wasn't quite clear.)
The background to this was yesterday's "gotcha" ploy by Attorney General John Ashcroft, who blamed intelligence failures at the FBI on the so-called "wall" between national security and criminal prosecution. Ashcroft said that this "wall" was constructed in a 1995 memo by … then-Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick.
Kevin Drum nicely summarizes the moment:
You can just feel the cleverness oozing from Ashcroft's pores as he felt "compelled" to mention that Gorelick was the author of the memo, can't you? It's like watching a high school student council meeting.
But there's a serious question here. The fact that Ashcroft was so pleased with himself makes it obvious that he declassified this memo for the sole purpose of embarrassing Gorelick, an action that continues a Bush administration pattern of casually declassifying anything that helps their political cause but refusing to declassify anything that might hurt them.
Yes. Kean and co-chair Lee Hamilton noted that they had not seen that particular memo until Ashcroft produced it, but also made it clear that the attorney general's understanding of the history of the intelligence "wall" was grossly inaccurate. (They traced it back to the 1980s, a time when, as Kean put it, the CIA was doing things, particularly in Central America, that the American people did not approve of.)
When a reporter asked the obvious question — didn't it seem like Ashcroft was just a grandstanding boob preening for the cameras and trying to politicize the commission's work for partisan gain? — Kean left others to draw their own conclusions.
The commission's job, he said, was too important for them to get distracted by "missiles" from the left or from the right. He declined to get drawn into a fight with the attorney general, but the message was clear: Knock it off and let us do our job.
Puhhfect.
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* originally tried to post this 5 p.m. yesterday, Typepad has been less than cooperative
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