Spying on Your Friends and Enemies

Laura’s right. Jeff Stein’s article detailing the several ways in which Senator Richard Shelby spied on Anthony Lake and similar activities raises all sorts of questions.

Tenet also wrote that, “National Security Agency officials told usthat Shelby staffers had been asking whether there was derogatoryinformation in their communications intercepts on Lake.”

But the NSA refused Shelby’s entreaties, two sources said, and there was no derogatory information in the FBI’s files.

Shelbyalso demanded, and got, the FBI’s raw files on Lake. The senator didnot respond to three days of requests last week for comment.

Laura reminds us that Shelby was the guy who leaked NSA intercepts from Al Qaeda to Fox News. But this story raises several other questions about the extent of this practice.

1. Two sources say the NSA refused to give Shelby what he wanted. But we know that the NSA did give John Bolton what he wanted. Who is getting info like this from NSA? High ranking executive branch officials? Congressmen? Who else?
2. Stein describes the nastiness of the Gosslings, going back to the 1990s. That reminds me of Pete Hoekstra’s threat (from July of last year) purportedly directed at the Administration. That threat seemed to be an attempt to prevent the Administration from letting someone competent–Steven Kappes–serve as Deputy Director of CIA (Kappes was removed, but now is back). The threat invoked an intelligence program the Administration had not revealed. I raise this because it seems to be a similar kind of spy v. spy within our own government, involving the same clique of Congressmen.
3. And what about Dusty Foggo? Foggo, of course, was a darling of the Gosslings, and third in command at CIA. If Congress is engaging in this kind of spying on political enemies, Foggo would be ideally placed to help out with the spying. Did he? If so, did it have any tie to the system of bribes he was engaged in?

I don’t know what to make of it at the moment. But it might well explain why Congress stinks so much–if they’re all the object and subject of spying, it would sure hurt their ability to do their job.