Big news this morning. Douglas Jehl reports that Senator Chris Dodd is digging deeper into the reasons why John Bolton requested mega-secret intercepts from the National Security Agency. From the article: John R.
Senator Chafee seems lately to be an expert in sending mixed signals. He has heard about patterned abusive behavior by John Bolton of subordinates and rivals — and has himself opened what is perhaps the most important line of questioning of Bolton and then acted like he was totally unaware of the issues he’s raised….
Senator Lugar knows that yesterday’s hearings just made the Bolton confirmation process much more messy than expected. Lugar does not like messiness — and leans over backward to assure that there is fair play in his committee hearings.
Bill Kristol just posted a piece on the Daily Standard site accusing detractors and skeptics of John Bolton’s U.N. nomination of character assassination. Bill knows this is NOT the case. Carl Ford’s testimony was not just about beating up an intelligence officer, as Kristol and others would love to limit this testimony to.
According to this report by Barry Schweid, Lincoln Chafee still intends to vote to confirm John Bolton. Dafna Linzer and Charles Babington of the Washington Post report this from Chafee: “It was strong testimony from Mr. Ford. He used strong language,” Chafee said. But “it’s all focused on this one incident.
The first REAL sparks just blew in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
What We Know So Far about Ambassador Jack Pritchard, John Bolton, James Woolsey, Senator Jon Kyl, and American National Security John Bolton not only tried to get intelligence agent Christian Westermann “removed” from Bolton’s portfolio (read, “fired”) at the State Department, he also seems to have recruited help outside the State Department bureaucracy — from…
Check out Fred Kaplan’s summary of today’s hearings with John Bolton. He thinks Bolton’s situation is bad. I’m not convinced that things are as bad as Kaplan portrays, but the vector was not positive for Bolton today.
If you missed the Bolton hearings, they will reply again on C-Span in their entirety tonight at 8 p.m. eastern time. Pay particular attention to Chuck Hagel’s and Lincoln Chafee’s questions.
Check it out. CNN‘s homepage is running a poll posing this question: Is John Bolton the right choice for U.S.
