 |
|
Where is the Weekly Standard when you need it, to defend Porter Goss's decision to appoint Dusty Foggo to the number three job at the Agency, now that Foggo has pled guilty to fraud and is going to jail? All that vigorous vetting at those Washington area poker games, never mind the contracts he took affirmative measures to hide that he was throwing at his friend Wilkes, and a few mistresses he badgered to have installed at various CIA jobs, according to just some of the the 28-count Foggo indictment (.pdf). What's a few million dollars in corruption and crony contracts if it's furthering the cause - well, what was the cause, installing chiefly fiercely partisan GOP loyalists throughout the Agency, as the White House was attempting to do at every other federal agency, Monica Goodling/Lurita Doan-style?
And where have Porter Goss and Patrick Murray snuck away? Don't they want to speak up, to defend their decision to appoint Foggo to the Executive Director job? And Patrick Murray especially interesting, since he was wired into the White House national security legal structure from the beginning, having served on the Bush/Cheney transition team, and been appointed by President Bush to serve as associate deputy attorney general at the Justice Department from 2001 to 2003 (an appointment the White House seems to have removed from its website), before becoming Goss's right fist at the Agency. That would be the Justice Department that ended up in May 2006 authorizing the FBI to conduct the unprecedented raid on Foggo's CIA office. The humiliating details of the case forcing the White House to abruptly dump Goss, news he was delivered in a phone call from the White House during a Friday May 5, 2006 lunch he was hosting for a visiting group of think tank scholars (he excused himself, and headed for the White House, where he was publicly retired, a decision he did not know about when his lunch began, according to a source of mine who happened to be there for lunch with the Director that day).
Time to speak up, Goss and Murray. First off, on whose recommendation exactly did Goss make the decision to appoint Foggo to the number three job? (This 2006 Newsweek piece worth rereading, which says Foggo had served as a kind of informant for Goss and the Gosslings when Goss headed HPSCI, no doubt at the aforementioned poker games). And what was it about the revelation that the FBI was investigating Foggo that seemed to make Goss's removal of utmost urgency for the White House? And, since partisan hackery over competence, professionalism or evidently ethics was apparently what the appointment was about, do they plan to visit Foggo in jail? Any more card games planned before Foggo heads to the slammer? It all seems so much like the end of Alberto Gonzales, who suddenly doesn't have a friend in Washington. Another case study of cronyism, partisan zealotry, overreach and incompetence for the history books about this sorry era.