Finally, there is something liberals and conservatives can agree on: CIA director John Brennan must go. So why is he still in office? Even more puzzling – why did the President go out of his way during last Friday’s press conference to state that Brennan has “his full confidence”? Of course, it is possible that Obama has just given Brennan the equivalent of the sports team’s owner’s public “vote of confidence” in the manager which is often a prelude to firing the unfortunate soul, but for now Brennan has the president’s public backing, and that does not sit well with some members of the Senate, never mind pundits on the Left and the Right.
The controversy regarding Brennan centers in part on the recent finding by an internal CIA Inspector General that five CIA employees improperly accessed a Senate Intelligence committee file pertaining to the committee’s investigation, using classified material, into the CIA’s detention and interrogation program. The disclosure came after Brennan had publicly denied allegations that CIA officials had accessed the files, saying, “As far as the allegations of, you know, CIA hacking into, you know, Senate computers, nothing could be further from the truth.” That turns out not to be true.
In the wake of the IG’s disclosure that the hacking did occur, Brennan has reportedly apologized to committee members. His apology, however, did not mollify everyone; at least two senators on the committee – Democrats Mark Udall and Martin Heinrich – have called for Brennan’s resignation, a call echoed by Republican Senator Rand Paul. Paul, you may remember, spent nearly 13 hours filibustering on the Senate floor last year in an unsuccessful effort to block Brennan’s nomination as CIA director.
To Brennan’s critics, the CIA director either authorized his agency to spy on the Senate committee, or he did not know the spying was occurring on his own watch. In either case, they argue, he deserves to be fired. Conspicuously, however, Senate Intelligence committee chairwoman Dianne Feinstein reportedly described Brennan’s apology, along with commissioning the internal review, as a “good first step” – hardly the sign of a person looking for Brennan’s scalp. This conciliatory tone stands in sharp contrast to her words last March, of course, when Feinstein took to the Senate floor to accuse the CIA of possibly violating the law and the Constitution by monitoring her staff’s computers. Of course, Feinstein may be saving her ammunition pending her own further investigation into the incident, but for now her reticence to call for Brennan’s resignation sends an important signal.
When the news broke regarding the CIA spying, I received several emails from long-time readers arguing that Brennan’s admission gave Obama an opportunity to show some long-needed decisiveness. By firing his CIA director, Obama would put away lingering doubts that he has the political backbone to make politically difficult choices while at the same time reining in an agency that seems to act without much accountability to elected officials. In my initial response, I expressed skepticism that Obama would act decisively and fire Brennan. Shortly thereafter the President expressed his full confidence in his embattled director.
Why hasn’t Obama fired Brennan? In my view it is because the President does not perceive it to be in his interest to do so. Remember, Brennan, the former White House terrorist “czar”, was the President’s hand-picked replacement for David Petraeus when Petraeus resigned over revelations that he had an extra-marital affair. Indeed, Obama nominated Brennan over safer and perhaps better qualified candidates such as Mike Morell, a career agency analyst and acting director after Petraeus’ resignation, and he did so even though Brennan was a controversial pick to some because of his role in developing the nation’s drone program – that partly prompted the Rand filibuster – and because critics viewed him as a defender of enhanced interrogation techniques.
Despite the controversy, Obama chose Brennan, I think, because after spending much of his first term in office mediating disputes between CIA director Leon Panetta and Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair, Obama undoubtedly realized that the DNI has no real operational clout, and that if he wants to ride herd on the intelligence process, he needed his own person at the CIA. This is not unusual – presidents often move White House political loyalists into executive leadership positions during their second term as a way to gain greater access, if not control, over important agencies. Bush the Younger did this when he transferred his national security adviser Condi Rice from the White House to head the State Department after he won reelection. Once ensconced at the top of the bureaucratic hierarchy, it usually takes a lot to force a president to replace a political loyalist. Keep in mind as well that there is always some political cost to removing officials, not least because it focuses media attention away from the issues Obama wants covered as the midterm elections loom.
Moreover, Brennan’s critics view this incident from a different perspective than does Obama. They see the CIA accessing the Senate files in constitutional terms, as both a violation of the separation of powers and further indication that the CIA is a lawless agency accountable to no one. But it is not at all clear to me that Obama agrees with or is bothered by either charge. From his perspective, having a politically loyal man head the CIA is worth a few ruffled feathers in the Senate and among the civil libertarian crowd.
Note that it is not necessary to fall back on theories of blackmail to understand Obama’s reluctance to fire Brennan – his actions are consistent with his behavior in the national security realm since the day he took office. Although many on the Left fervently hoped that Obama would bring the anti-terrorist national security apparatus established during the Bush administration to heel, he has instead left it largely intact, and in some instances, as with drone strikes, expanded its reach. The reason, as I’ve discussed before, is that Obama feels his constitutional imperative to protect the nation’s security in the age of terror no less acutely than did Bush. From all accounts, Brennan plays an integral role in that fight. That combination of shared experience, personal loyalty and institutional access would be hard to replace. Moreover, as I’ve noted many times, Obama is at heart a centrist and a pragmatist who has shown no proclivity to push principle at the expense of practical politics. That is just not his way.
Yes, I understand that many on the Left and the Right see the CIA’s action as an egregious breach of civil liberties and constitutional prerogatives. But their ire is misdirected. If they want Brennan fired, they need to direct their protests at Congress. Unless Obama calculates that the political cost of Brennan remaining as CIA director outweighs the benefits of having his hand-picked man heading that agency, Brennan will likely stay.
UPDATE 12:10 p.m. : Jonathan Bernstein beat me to the punch with this post yesterday, but he comes to a similar conclusion – that Obama is trying to strengthen ties with the intelligence community: http://bv.ms/1zR52zQ
UPDATE 5:30 p.m: More evidence that Obama sees the CIA spy case as predominantly a national security issue as opposed to a constitutional or civil liberties problem: his administration has heavily redacted, for security reasons, the Senate Intelligence Committee report documenting the CIA detention and interrogation program. (This was the report that prompted the CIA to access Senate files.) Feinstein is evidently not happy and wants Obama to reduce the number of redactions. See: http://blogs.rollcall.com/wgdb/feinstein-seeks-to-reduce-blackouts-in-torture-report-summary/