Pelosi's Unintelligent Choice Pelosi's Unintelligent Choice

WaPo article by Ruth Marcus: Pelosi's Unintelligent Choice points out that if Nacy Pelosi becomes Speaker Pelosi, one of her first big decisions is who to appoint to lead the Intelligence Committee. She doesn't like Jane Harman, who is first in line, and the Congressional Black Caucus has given her an ultimatum that she appoint impeached former judge Alcee Hastings to this position, after she pushed Wm. Jefferson from the Ways and Means Committee after being caught by the FBI with $90,000 in bribes in his freezer. Personally, I would prefer Jefferson on Ways and Means to Hastings having full access to intelligence matters. Both appear to have taken bribes, but Jefferson can do a lot less damage than Hastings can. Though the author likes Hastings, she doesn't think he should chair Intelligence:

Consider: Hastings, a federal judge, gets word from Borders's lawyer that Borders has been arrested for conspiring to bribe him and that the FBI wants to interview him. Instead of calling the FBI agents whose names and numbers he's been given, Hastings leaves his hotel without checking out and heads to the airport outside Baltimore instead of National, where there's an earlier flight. At BWI, Hastings calls his girlfriend, has her call him back at a different pay phone, then asks her to leave the house to call him from a pay phone, then calls her back from a different pay phone. He doesn't speak to the FBI until they track him down at the girlfriend's house later that night.

Speaker-in-waiting Pelosi: This is not the behavior of an innocent man -- or of an intelligence committee chairman.

It isn't the behavior of an innocent man, but it may be good training for overseeing spying agencies.