Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell on Thursday explained his opposition to the nomination of John Brennan as CIA director.
“During January of 2009, the President issued a series of executive orders, which, in my judgment, weakened the ability of our intelligence community’s ability to find, capture, detain and interrogate terrorists,” McConnell said on the Senate floor. “As President Obama’s senior adviser on counterterrorism, Mr. Brennan has been a fierce defender of the administration’s approach to counterterrorism, as articulated by the executive orders I just referred to. He’s been a loyal, dogged defender of the administration’s policies, policies with which I seriously disagree. My greatest concern is that the director of Central Intelligence must be entirely independent of partisan politics in developing objective analysis and advice, which he gives to the President. After four years of working within the White House, confronting difficult policy matters on a daily basis and having attempted to defend the administration’s policies, sometimes publicly, sometimes to the media and occasionally to the United States Senate, I question whether Mr. Brennan can detach himself from those experiences. For that reason I will oppose his nomination.”
