Nov. 3, 2006 – 7:53 p.m.
While a high-noon shootout looms between Speaker-in-waiting
That’s because Hastings, D-Fla., who has been on the panel since 1999, is pinned down in a crossfire over events that began more than 20 years ago, when he was a federal judge in Florida and charged with taking a $150,000 bribe. Now 70, Hastings was acquitted in the supposedly slam dunk case, but six years later Congress chased him from the bench via impeachment.
Hastings claimed racism a driving force in his prosecution, which drew scoffs from some African-Americans in Congress.
But instead of disappearing down a political drain pipe, the disgraced judge shrugged off his fate in 1992 and staged a nervy comeback, which gave him a seat in the Congress that had reviled him only three years earlier, by a vote of 413 to 3.
All that has overshadowed his work on the intelligence panel, which he joined in 1999. During 2002-2004, he was the ranking member of the now defunct Subcommittee on Terrorism and Homeland Security. Currently he’s a senior Democrat on two other subcommittees, including the one that assesses how well the CIA is doing recruiting spies.
“Succeeding is the best revenge,” he once said. “My goal was to get beyond people viewing me as an impeached judge.”
Goal denied.
The closer the Democrats have crept to taking power, the more conservatives have howled about Hastings’ original sin.
That’s because, with Pelosi reportedly planning to dump fellow California Democrat
“Imagine for an instant Alcee Hastings as chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence,” wrote author Kenneth R. Timmerman on the right-wing blog FrontPageMagazine.com. “Here is a man who was appointed to the federal bench by Jimmy Carter in 1979, and whose outright corruption was so egregious that his own party saw fit to impeach him 10 years later.”
For his part, Hastings isn’t talking. But just the outside possibility that he might actually get the gavel has the Congressional Black Caucus cheering — and threatening dire consequences if Pelosi tries to leapfrog somebody over the more senior former judge.
All of this has other Democrats and intelligence professionals wringing their hands that Hastings, whose expertise is otherwise uncontested, would become a lightning rod for the GOP. That, they say, could cripple the already slow pace of reforming the spy agencies.
“It seems unwise for Democrats to let such an easy target for the GOP chair such an important committee,” says a DHS intelligence official, in a view commonly heard around the security agencies.
Republicans “will say that his appointment is a sign that the party is more concerned about political correctness than national security.”
Harman’s sin seems to be that she’s built bridges to the Republicans amid the ferocious barking across the aisles over warrantless wiretapping and pre-Iraq war intelligence.
In contrast, Hastings has been no shrinking violet when it comes to the Bush administration’s record.
Hastings, now cruising toward an eighth term, unopposed, from the Ft. Lauderdale-West Palm Beach area, has hurled rhetorical fireballs at the administration’s intelligence assessments of Iraq’s (nonexistent) possession of weapons of mass destruction.
And in a hearing last July, he accused the Republicans of opening the doors to another Watergate era — the illegal wiretaps, break-ins and other “White House horrors,” as John N. Mitchell, the Nixon administration’s attorney general put it, that were directed at Vietnam War critics between 1969 and 1972.
“Some in our government, quite frankly, just haven’t learned a doggone thing,” Hastings said at the hearing. “Unchecked surveillance didn’t make us any safer in the ’70s, and I don’t believe that it will now. As Benjamin Franklin said . . . ‘Any society that would give up a little liberty for a little security will deserve neither and will lose both.’ ”
Hastings went on to tell
Passing the bill would be “disastrous,” he said. “It redefines surveillance in an irresponsible way and the effect is that NSA or the FBI would be able to listen to any call or read any e-mail that comes into or goes out of the United States.”
Although Hastings voted (with all but one member of Congress) to give President Bush “all necessary and appropriate force against terrorists and nations that aid them” days after the Sept. 11 attacks, he also voted against the hastily assembled Patriot Act, with 62 other Democrats, the following month.
Hastings’ globetrotting for the past two years as president of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, or OSCE, has also come under fire.
The Front Page blog highlighted the congressman’s “truancy” from key House votes. And the Miami Herald noted that “[d]uring a recent vote on legislation to punish thieves of confidential phone records,” Hastings “was in Russia meeting with the leader of the Russian Parliament.”
All this has led conservatives to put Hastings at the forefront of the “Defeatocrats,” as a New York Post columnist put it, poised to take over the national security organs of Congress.
A source close to the struggle over the chairmanship of the Intelligence Committee says the sobriquets are twisted and unfair.
“You can’t get good information in Washington,” he said on condition of anonymity, because Pelosi has lowered a cone of silence around Democrats on the succession question.
Hastings wears two hats on his travels, he explained, one as a top OSCE official, the other as a ranking member of a House subcommittee that evaluates the CIA’s work abroad.
“He has visited more of our intelligence community in the last two years than probably all the other members of the committee combined,” the source maintained.
And the places he visits are hardly glamour spots, say his defenders — Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Belarus, former Soviet Georgia, Montenegro and the like.
He also went to Baghdad, Beirut, Israel and Cyprus on a recent congressional delegation.
“Okay, Cyprus is nice, but the rest, you’d hardly call them vacation destinations,” the source said. “Who wants to spend a weekend in Podgorica [the capital of Montenegro]?”
After a visit to Kazakhstan, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice debriefed him “one on one for an hour,” the source said.
With all the election season flak coming Hastings’ way, you might think he’d be getting a cold shoulder from Republicans on the Intelligence Committee.
But during a hearing in July, no less than chairman Peter R. Hoekstra of Michigan, who has been a little short with Democrats over the past year, tossed Hastings a bone just for wrapping up his remarks on time.
“Mr. Hastings was so unusually cooperative when the light came on,” Hoekstra said. “It’s like, you know, the first person kind of sets the standard for how the rest of us are expected to behave for the rest of the day.”
Even a few Florida Republicans came to his aid last week when the attacks on his character sharpened.
“Alcee is a good, patriotic American, and he’s a capable guy, and he’s a friend of mine,” Rep.
The chairman of the Broward County Republicans, Shane Strum, dismissed the rehashing of Hastings’ trial and impeachment as “something from long ago.”
“I don’t think that’s going to play here locally,” Strum told the newspaper.
One reason Hastings’ Republican colleagues may have gone soft on him is that the one-time judge is considered a thoughtful and knowledgeable member dedicated to improving the spy agencies’ performance.
He has criticized the CIA’s pace in recruiting a more diverse cultural and ethnic work force, but he also tucked an amendment into the House version of the 2004 intelligence authorization bill to create a pilot project to improve the recruitment of minorities and women into its ranks.
And he was onto al Qaeda when most members of Congress probably thought it was an insect.
In 1998, he petitioned then-House leaders Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., and Richard A. Gephart, D-Mo., to “find a way to allow for academia and experts to come here and discuss with us the nature of the religion Islam.” He “renewed that request to Speaker Hastert and Ms. Pelosi,” he said during a Feb. 2005 hearing on national security threats. “And all of them were generous to a fault by suggesting that it was a nice idea, but nothing has come of it.”
That nettled him to no end, he said. It was dangerous not to understand the enemy.
“I venture to you,” he said, that if all the 435 members of Congress were given a quiz “to contrast and compare Sunni and Shiite Muslims, an average professor with understanding would [flunk] more than three-quarters of the members of this institution.”
“Hastings,” maintains an ally, “could probably lecture on Islam for an hour or two.”
But he’s not saying much of anything these days. The succession issue is nitroglycerin.
So he’s hunkered down, not talking.
But the questions will only get hotter after the elections. He’ll never be able to run away from his past.
Nor will
“It’s a sad state of affairs,” says a top former White House counterterrorism official.
Jeff Stein can be reached at jstein@cq.com.