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One more thing. It's my understanding that the CIA has been hearing detailed allegations about Foggo from reporters since as early as the first week of December. I don't mean gossip. I mean multiple-sourced, first hand accounts, going back thirty years, as well as outlines of contracts. The natural thing for CIA public affairs to do is: push back very hard on the press. But also -- to go upstairs and tell the boss's staff that there may be a problem.
The thing is, it wasn't only CIA that got early warnings about Foggo - and that he legitimately could be a subject of the FBI corruption investigation surrounding Duke Cunningham and Brent Wilkes, Mitchell Wade, etc. Those details were also shared with the House Intel committee, HPSCI, it is my understanding. Detailed memos. With information that would become known to federal investigators. (Perhaps Hoekstra "wasn't surprised" by the recent prostitution allegations connected to the wider Cunningham corruption case, because he had been alerted to some of the alleged details before.)
And then come around late December/early January, HPSCI decided to investigate the matter of whether Cunningham had improperly steered any intel business to those involved in the bribery scheme using his position on the House intelligence committee. But in an interview with a former leading Senate Intel committee member, he suggested that given his past experience, that HPSCI would almost certainly also be asking the Director of the CIA to check into the Foggo matter on his end, and tell them, whether he's clean or if he is going to pursue further investigation.
As far as I can tell, there was no sign of any CIA investigation of any Foggo role in the wider Cunningham matter even opening until March. And perhaps they thought that it might all be able to be handled very quietly.
So -- Negroponte, or HPSCI, and perhaps others may have been disturbed to get what seems like a heads up from law enforcement in the past week's leaks to the Wall Street Journal, etc. that Foggo is under investigation, and that a whole very messy story with potentially explosive aspects that are not inconsequential to Congress looks about to blow up.
And don't forget this detail reported by Jason Vest: that the woman now serving as Negroponte's #3, Mary Margaret Graham, left the Agency after raising concerns about the appointment of a certain Kyle Dustin Foggo to be the CIA's Executive Director in the first place; her departure was accompanied by a shouting match in which Goss's deputy Patrick Murray -- in apparently his typically charming style -- threatened Graham, then the CIA's counterintel chief, that if anything about Foggo's past ever leaked out, she would be held personally responsible.
So when the Foggo stuff leaked out, quite independent of anything to do with Graham, but because of a federal corruption probe into a Congressman, all the pieces were in place for a long history of people having staked out their positions on this. And it speaks to how Goss let his staff mishandle personnel issues in a larger sense as well.
I don't think this is the only reason for Goss's departure, but I think it might be a factor in the timing of Goss's departure -- a management issue concerning Foggo, some assurance Goss might have given Negroponte or HPSCI that this was all being taken care of, that there was a lid on it, or perhaps that there was nothing there. And then they recently discovered to their chagrin, the lid was coming off.
That would actually be technically consistent with the official timeline, however misleading the spin of this is.
(This post has been updated).