Who Runs Gov

This one is getting weirder by the second. Obama’s top intelligence guy, Dennis Blair, is now claiming that he never said the CIA’s concealment of a Bush-era secret program from Congress was legal, as The Washington Post reported recently.

I told you last week that it was a big deal when Blair appeared to claim to the Post that it was legal for the CIA to conceal an Al Qaeda assassination program from Congress, putting the White House at odds with Congressional Dems who are probing the program. Senator Russ Feingold recently challenged Blair to justify his legal reasoning.

Blair, the Director of National Intelligence, has now responded in a letter to Feingold obtained by Spencer Ackerman:

In my discussion with the Washington Post, I never offered a legal judgment about whether the CIA was required to brief the Congressional oversight committees on this specific program; I merely indicated that whether a particular matter requires notification to the Congress often involves the exercise of judgment.

Blair “never offered a legal judgment” on this? That’s at odds with the original Post report, which said unequivocally that Blair asserted “that the CIA did not violate the law when it failed to inform lawmakers about the secret program.”

Be that as it may, the follow-up question is obvious: What is Blair’s legal judgment here? Feingold says the CIA may have broken the law. So does Rep Jan Schakowski. What does Obama’s top intel guy think? This is the right question, isn’t it?

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