As the Senate Intelligence Committee struggles to complete its investigation into prewar intelligence, some Republicans have become increasingly concerned that they are at a disadvantage in the bitter and partisan fight over what is known as “Phase Two” of the probe. “We don’t have a majority on the committee,” says one Hill Republican, noting that while the GOP, of course, maintains formal control of the committee — there are eight Republicans and seven Democrats — Republican lawmakers have lost effective control because two of their own, Senators Chuck Hagel of Nebraska and Olympia Snowe of Maine, sometimes side with Democrats.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
ADVERTISEMENT
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Now, National Review Online has learned that a key Republican committee staffer in the politically charged prewar intelligence investigation is a veteran of the 2004 Kerry presidential campaign. Eric Rosenbach, hired by Sen. Hagel to work on prewar intelligence issues, came to the Senate after completing studies at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government under Rand Beers, a top foreign-policy adviser for Kerry. In Fall 2004, Rosenbach took three weeks to volunteer for the Kerry campaign in York County, Pennsylvania.
“Senator Hagel knew that he worked for Rand Beers,” Hagel spokesman Mike Buttry tells NRO. “He did not know that he had volunteered in the Kerry campaign.”
In 2004, while at the Kennedy School, Rosenbach worked on what is known as a Policy Analysis Exercise, or PAE, for the Kerry campaign. A number of students at the Kennedy School were doing similar things, and an article in the school’s Autumn 2004 bulletin explains the work Rosenbach, who earned an MPP, or Master of Public Policy degree, did for Kerry, through his adviser Beers:
For some students, working on a PAE for a campaign has the added bonus of making them feel like they’re a part of history in the making. Eric Rosenbach, MPP 2004, and Blake Mobley, MPP 2004, realized this when they worked on a PAE for Rand Beers that looks at how Kerry should handle postconflict reconstruction. Beers, national security advisor for Kerry’s campaign, taught a class at the Kennedy School in the spring with former Bush advisor Richard Clarke…
Rosenbach remembers one day in particular that stood out. “Blake and I were sitting in Rand’s office, watching Dick testify before the 9/11 Commission while Rand was checking over our final draft,” he said. “His testimony was pretty moving because he (Dick) apologized to the families of the victims of 9/11. Dick also specifically mentioned his close friendship with Rand. So imagine: Blake and I looking at each other, wide-eyed, as we watched Dick talk about Rand while he was reading our stuff!”
Later, Rosenbach was recommended to Hagel, according to spokesman Buttry, by Graham Allison, a professor at the Kennedy School — and another adviser to Kerry. “Graham said, ‘This is someone you need to take a look at,’“ Allison told Hagel, according to Buttry’s account.
Finally, Rosenbach is a co-author of “Defeating the Jihadists,” a 2004 report published by the liberal Century Foundation, in which he shared credit with Clarke, the White House counterterrorism official-turned-Bush-critic, and also with, among others, former Clinton White House official Roger Cressey, former Clinton White House official Steven Simon, former Clinton White House official William Wechsler, and former Clinton White House official Lee Wolosky.
According to the website PoliticalMoneyLine, the only political contribution Rosenbach has made was a $1,900 donation to Democratic congressional candidate Barend Samara, who in 2004 lost a hard-fought race for the House from New York’s 29th District.
There is no doubt that Rosenbach is highly qualified to work for the committee; Buttry points out that he is a former Fulbright scholar and Army intelligence-company commander who has studied at Harvard and Georgetown Law School. If Rosenbach had been hired by, say, Sen. Jay Rockefeller, the top-ranking Democrat on the committee, or next-in-line Democratic Sen. Carl Levin, no one would have viewed the appointment as at all unusual. But not on the GOP side. “This is an intensely political committee,” says one Senate Republican. “The whole track record of the committee is political.” In the us-versus-them world of the committee as it exists today, Rosenbach’s background of Democratic partisanship raises plenty of Republican eyebrows.
Meanwhile, the committee’s Phase Two investigation is creeping toward completion — or, perhaps, deadlock. According to several sources familiar with the work, the committee is making progress, but it is an uneven affair. Phase Two is made up of five parts, and some of them are close to completion, while others might never be finished.
Part one is an examination of the prewar intelligence itself. It is said to be nearly done, with both sides agreeing on the basic findings. In some ways, that has been a relatively easy job; the prewar intelligence was, after all, inaccurate. The committee is said to have found no surprises in that area.
Part two is an investigation of how the intelligence community used information provided by the Iraqi National Congress and Ahmed Chalabi in the run-up to the war. This area is more contentious than the first, but the committee is said to have found essentially what the Robb-Silberman Commission found, that is, that information from the INC did not play a major role in the decision to go to war. The committee’s work on this issue is said to be nearly finished.
Part three concerns the administration’s prewar assessments of postwar Iraq, sometimes known as the “they didn’t greet us with flowers” investigation. This area is said to be substantially completed, but there are still disagreements about the wording of the findings.
Part four concerns the work of the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans. This area is virtually the sole project of Sen. Levin, who has been acutely interested in the work of the office’s former chief, Douglas Feith. Levin has accused Feith of distorting, exaggerating, inventing, or manipulating intelligence about the connections between Iraq and al Qaeda and about Saddam Hussein’s weapons capabilities — and then deceiving Congress about it. Committee chairman Pat Roberts has said his panel found no credible evidence to support Levin’s charges and referred the matter to the Pentagon’s inspector general for review. Now, nothing will be done in this area until the Pentagon gives its findings to the committee — which could take months.
Finally, part five concerns the public statements made by government officials in the lead-up to the war. This area is said to be a matter of such deep division and contention that it might never be completed. Originally, committee Democrats wanted to examine only the statements made by White House and administration officials, comparing those statements to available intelligence to determine whether they were exaggerated. But Roberts pointed out that many lawmakers, Republican and Democrat, had made statements before the war, too. For example, Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Ted Kennedy said, in September 2002, that “We have known for many years that Saddam Hussein is seeking and developing weapons of mass destruction.” Why not examine statements like Kennedy’s, too? Roberts asked. Democrats resisted, especially when Roberts proposed that senators evaluate each statement on its substance without knowing the identity of the speaker. That course would have been fraught with danger for Democrats: What if they condemned one of their own? A standoff ensued, and it is not clear when, or if, it will be resolved.
So that is the status of Phase Two. At each step of the way, senators and staffers on the committee are operating in a far more partisan environment than in the past; the days when the committee was perhaps the most nonpartisan on Capitol Hill are long gone. That is why some Republicans were not terribly surprised to learn that Eric Rosenbach, the GOP staffer, had a plainly partisan background. They were just surprised to find which party it involved.
— Byron York, NR’s White House correspondent, is the author of The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy: The Untold Story of How Democratic Operatives, Eccentric Billionaires, Liberal Activists, and Assorted Celebrities Tried to Bring Down a President — and Why They’ll Try Even Harder Next Time.
