Do you remember Barbara Boxer reading Dick Lugar the riot act at the end of the last Senate Foreign Relations committee hearing on John Bolton? She was determined to get a commitment from Lugar that the State Department would comply with the committee Democrats requests for information related to Bolton. Do you remember what Dick said?
Today we can see how far that trust should be extended….
Following the April 19 meeting, committee members prepared requests for additional interviews and information, including new interviews with former State Department legal counsel William Taft, former CIA official Alan Foley, and former CIA Deputy Director John McLaughlin and second interviews with Thomas Hubbard, former ambassador to South Korea, former acting chief of the National Intelligence Council Stuart Cohen, and Neil Silver, director of the strategic proliferation office. Additional information was requested regarding the identity of US officials associated with 10 NSA intercepts that Bolton requested and Bolton’s relationship to the development of information on Cuban bio weapons programs.
But today we learn that Lugar is throwing the trust under the bus:
The move was a blow to Democrats on the panel, who have focused on the dispute as a central part of their effort to defeat Bolton’s nomination as ambassador to the United Nations.
The Democrats contend Bolton improperly sought to toughen intelligence assessments of Syria as late as the summer of 2003, after the American failure to find illicit weapons in Iraq had raised alarms about the danger of inflated intelligence.
Of nine broad requests submitted Friday by Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, three were for records related at least in part to the Syria dispute. But in a letter sent to Rice yesterday about the document requests, the panel’s chairman, Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana, made no mention of the three requests related to Syria or another related to remarks Bolton delivered in 2001 on Sudan.
Lugar and Rice are not about to comply with the information requests made by the Democrats. Lugar has described these requests as only being marginally related to Bolton’s nomination. I completely disagree. If Bolton was trying to trump a case that Iraq’s WMD’s were transferred to Syria as a pretext for military action against Syria, that is way more than marginally relevant, especially in light of the CIA’s recent admission that is unlikely WMD were transferred to Syria. Bushco is hiding something that would be revealed if the SFR committee Dem’s information request was fully answered. I believe they are hiding evidence of a pattern of stovepiping intelligence to fit a desired outcome. Bolton is key to that stovepiping effort.
