Chief Spy or Chief Enforcer?

But, Mazzetti writes: "In an interview in his office, Mr. McConnell insisted on Tuesday that he never felt direct pressure from the White House to reject the Democratic proposal, and that contrary to statements from senior Democrats he had never given a verbal commitment to their plan.

"Although he acknowledged that intense pressures from Capitol Hill during the debate over competing versions of the surveillance legislation, he said his job required him to remain 'apolitical' even in the midst of a partisan cyclone like last week's debate in Congress.

"'My job is to speak truth to power,' he said. . . .

"Representative Rush D. Holt, a New Jersey Democrat who is a member of the House Intelligence Committee, called Mr. McConnell's role in the surveillance debate an 'unsatisfactory, even embarrassing performance.'

"'If a senior member of the intelligence community is going to speak truth to power,' Mr. Holt said, 'he has to be in the habit of presenting the unvarnished truth.'"

And, as Mazzetti notes: "Questions about the political distortion of intelligence have been a leitmotif of the Bush administration since the debates preceding the invasion of Iraq."

Ellen Nakashima and Joby Warrick wrote in Sunday's Washington Post that some House Democrats were "upset by what they saw as a deliberate scuttling by the White House of negotiations on a compromise bill. On Thursday, Democratic leaders reached what they believed was a deal with the government's chief intelligence official, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell, only to be presented with a new list of conditions at the last minute.

"The White House and McConnell have denied that a deal had been reached.

"'I think the White House didn't want to take "yes" for an answer from the Democrats,' said Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), an intelligence committee member."

Here is a statement McConnell put out on Friday, at the height of the administration's fear campaign, after reviewing a Senate Democratic bill: "The Majority Bill creates significant uncertainty in an area where certainty is paramount in order to protect the country. I must have certainty in order to protect the nation from attacks that are being planned today to inflict mass casualties on the United States."

The New York Times editorial board wrote yesterday: "Mr. McConnell certified that the House [Democratic] bill would address the problem raised by the court. That is, until the White House made clear that it wanted to . . . grab a lot more power. Mr. McConnell then reversed his position and demanded that Congress pass the far more expansive bill."

Andy Barr writes in the Hill newspaper about McConnell's post-victory attempt to make nice with the Senate: "Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell promised to keep Congress 'fully and currently informed' on powers granted to the intelligence community under an update to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which lawmakers passed before leaving for recess.