{"id":5797,"date":"2005-11-10T10:59:51","date_gmt":"2005-11-10T15:59:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/?p=5797"},"modified":"2005-11-10T10:59:51","modified_gmt":"2005-11-10T15:59:51","slug":"the-frist-hastert-stunt-goes-awry-day-three","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/the-frist-hastert-stunt-goes-awry-day-three\/","title":{"rendered":"The Frist-Hastert stunt goes awry — Day Three"},"content":{"rendered":"

So much for the Republican leadership’s clever ideas. To briefly recap, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and House Speaker Dennis Hastert announced Tuesday that they wanted a formal congressional investigation into the leak to the Washington Post<\/a> about “black sites,” the CIA’s secret prisons in Europe. The idea, apparently, was to put Dems on the defensive and show GOP leaders taking leaks of classified information seriously.<\/p>\n

Since then, it’s been one embarrassment after another. Trent Lott said the leak may have come from a Republican senator<\/a>; the left seemed to love the Frist\/Hastert idea<\/a>, and Republican lawmakers said they can’t understand why the party leaders want hearings on the leak over secret CIA prisons but not the prisons themselves<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It gets worse. Now, the House Intelligence Committee is unhappy<\/a> with the Frist\/Hastert stunt, saying the leaders’ request for a leak investigation is contradicting the committee’s work. Meanwhile, the Senate Intelligence Committee chairman has said he’s ignoring the Frist\/Hastert request<\/a>.<\/p>\n

And The Hill reports the entire stunt was a mess from the beginning<\/a>.<\/p>\n

A leak suspected to have come from the office of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) complicated, confused and nearly derailed a joint effort by Senate and House Republican leaders to seek an investigation of the unauthorized release of classified information. […]<\/p>\n

The request for the investigation was intended to give Republicans political momentum on the issue of national security at a time when Democrats have recently scored public-relations victories on national security. Instead, the premature release of Frist and Hastert’s letter set off a chain of events that drew attention to what some House Republicans call the inability of the Senate to coordinate with them.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In their wildest dreams, Dems couldn’t have asked for such incompetent rivals.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So much for the Republican leadership’s clever ideas. To briefly recap, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and House Speaker Dennis Hastert announced Tuesday that they wanted a formal congressional investigation into the leak to the Washington Post about “black sites,” the CIA’s secret prisons in Europe. The idea, apparently, was to put Dems on the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5797","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5797","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5797"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5797\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5797"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5797"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5797"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}