MADDOW: If a religious extremist in a foreign country was under surveillance by U.S. intelligence, what would you call someone who tipped off that extremist, who told that person that U.S. intelligence was watching them, and specifically, that their E-mail was compromised, that intelligence agents were reading every word of their E-mails?
What would you call the person who completely blew that intelligence effort? Blew that surveillance target? Blew that lead that U.S. intelligence was following to fight terrorism?
In this case, you'd call that person congressman - Congressman Pete Hoekstra, the highest-ranking Republican on the Intelligence Committee.
As we talked about on this show last night, Congressman Hoekstra took it upon himself yesterday to disclose to "The Washington Post" that the alleged shooter in the Ft. Hood massacre, Maj. Nidal Hasan, not only had sent E-mails to a radical cleric living in Yemen. He had received two E-mails from that cleric as well. That's news, right?
No law enforcement agency or intelligence agency has released that information. No one from the U.S. government or anywhere else had gone on record or even leaked anonymously to the press that there were E-mails from that radical cleric to Maj. Hasan.
It's just Pete Hoekstra who said that to "The Washington Post," thereby broadcasting to the world the previously undisclosed fact that U.S. intelligence was reading that cleric's E-mail.
Pete Hoekstra has access to all sorts of classified information because he is the ranking Republican on the Intelligence Committee. When Republicans were the majority, he was Chair of Intelligence.
And people, including me, on this show, frankly clamor for there to be more oversight in Congress of what the intelligence agencies are doing, when people worry that by withholding details of what they're doing from Congress, the intelligence agencies are forming, in effect, a secret U.S. government that does want it wants with a huge budget and no accountability. And frankly, that's scary for democracy, and therefore the Congress ought to be told what the intelligence agencies are doing.
Do you want to see exhibit A of why that doesn't happen, why anyone defending the intelligence agencies' inclination to not tell things to Congress has a pretty good case to make about the grandstanding, reckless and humiliatingly dumb behavior of some of the people to whom they're supposed to be disclosing things?
Congressman Pete Hoekstra is exhibit A. It was 2006 when Congressman Hoekstra championed the idea of putting up online, a huge archive of uncensored Iraqi government documents that had not been gone through at all to see if there was anything sensitive in them.
But Pete Hoekstra, as then chair of the Intelligence Committee, sided with conservatives who argued that our intelligence agencies couldn't really be counted on to go through all these documents. They'd rather just post them all online, all of them, and even the charts, diagrams, equations and lengthy detailed narrative instructions about how to build nuclear weapons. Even the schematic showing how to build nuclear firing circuits and how to structure the radioactive cores of atom bombs.
Even the instructions in Arabic, of course, for how to make the lethal nerve agents tabun and sarin. You can thank the Congressman Pete Hoekstra, top Republican on Intelligence, for pushing to put all of that online, until even the Bush administration realize what a disaster Hoekstra has caused and pulled it all down.
Then, there was the time in 2007 when Pete Hoekstra leaked classified information in an op-ed in "The New York Post," disclosing in the middle of an apparently un-ironic rant about how leaks to the news media seriously undermined anti-terrorists intelligence programs, disclosing in the middle of that, that that year's Intelligence Bill cut human intelligence programs.
Which may have been true, but which we weren't supposed to know since that was in the classified portion of the bill, even though Congressman Hoekstra put it in "The New York Post."
And that was the time when Congressman Hoekstra went on a congressional delegation to Iraq. Now, we get to see photo ops of our members of Congress in Iraq when they go on these trips, but not generally until they're home safe.
The secrecy surrounding Codels - congressional delegations to war zones - is to protect the members of Congress while they're there. But when Pete Hoekstra is around, there's really no such thing as secrecy.
Hoekstra helpfully tweeted in real time from Baghdad, "Just landed in Baghdad. I believe that may be the first time I had Blackberry service in Iraq." Then two hours later, he tweeted, "Moved into Green Zone by helicopter. Iraqi flag now over palace. Headed to the new U.S. Embassy."
So anyone wanting to take out a few members of Congress on a trip to the war zone? Congressman Hoekstra is happy to provide you with a detailed, real time itinerary.
This is the top Republican on the Intelligence Committee. They think they've gotten no one with better judgment than this guy. Remember when he and Rick Santorum said they found the weapons of mass destruction in IRAQ?
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
FMR. SEN. RICK SANTORUM (R-PA): Congressman Hoekstra and I are here today to say that we have weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
REP. PETE HOEKSTRA (R-MI): These weapons have been discovered. More weapons exist. And they state that Iraq was not a WMD free zone.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MADDOW: That's what is called a face plant - Rick Santorum trying to become famous for something other than having said the phrase "man on dog" in an AP interview years earlier.
And Pete Hoekstra, supposedly the cream of the crop, the best the Republican Party has to offer on intelligence, calling a press conference to declare that they've found weapons left over from the Iran-Iraq war that everyone already knew were there.
It was like finding out that the smoking gun was a squirt gun with a leak. The intelligence community at that time essentially laughed in Santorum and Hoekstra's faces, declaring immediately to the press that despite the breathless announcement from these two guys, the munitions dated from before the 1991 Persian Gulf War. And there's not now news, they said, from the coalition point of view.
While most people at that point would be humiliated and would apologize for wasting everyone's time, and Mr. Hoekstra, in stead, went on the attack, writing an op-ed for "The Wall Street Journal" in which he alleged that the intelligence community that had so embarrassed and his friend Rick over the "we found the WMD" press conference were actually a bunch of politicized intelligence officers who he called bureaucrats with friends in the media who were, quote, "using the release or withholding of documents to advance their political desires."
And what are those political desires, Congressman Hoekstra? He said, quote, "To either damage the administration or help al-Qaeda or perhaps both."
You know, all the al-Qaeda sympathizers in America's intelligence agencies. And incredulous Spencer Ackerman then reporting for "The New Republic" asked Hoekstra if he really meant that there were people inside U.S. intel who were al-Qaeda sympathizers.
Hoekstra's response, quote, "To rule out the possibility that there are people in the intelligence community that are doing this to help al-Qaeda, I think, would be naive."
This is the guy who now gets away with saying things like this about other politicians.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
HOEKSTRA: She has single-handedly become a wrecking ball - a wrecking crew through the morale of the intelligence community.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MADDOW: As opposed to Pete Hoekstra who has been awesome for morale in the intelligence community who supported our intelligence professionals by calling them al-Qaeda sympathizers and publishing classified details of their budget and outing their surveillance targets.
Jamal Ware, Mr. Hoekstra's spokesman yesterday told us that Hoekstra didn't know if that radical cleric knew his E-mails were being monitored before Hoekstra leaked it to "The Washington Post."
In 2006, that same spokesman responded to complaints about Hoekstra getting nuclear bombs and sarin making instructions posted on the Internet by saying that those complaints did not sound like a big deal.
Pete Hoekstra is now running for governor in Michigan. Does anyone know if that job comes with access to sensitive information?
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