{"id":24460,"date":"2020-05-06T16:09:15","date_gmt":"2020-05-06T23:09:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/?p=24460"},"modified":"2020-05-06T16:09:15","modified_gmt":"2020-05-06T23:09:15","slug":"new-counterintelligence-leader","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/?p=24460","title":{"rendered":"NEW COUNTERINTELLIGENCE LEADER"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Senate voted Wednesday to confirm President Trump’s counterintelligence chief after the nomination was stuck in limbo for nearly two years.<\/p>\n

Senators voted 83-7 on William Evanina’s nomination to be the director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center.<\/p>\n

Democratic Sens. Richard Blumenthal (Conn.),\u00a0Tammy Duckworth\u00a0(Ill.),\u00a0Mazie Hirono\u00a0(Hawaii),\u00a0Ed Markey\u00a0(Mass.),\u00a0Jeff Merkley\u00a0(Ore.),\u00a0Chris Van Hollen\u00a0(Md.) and\u00a0Ron Wyden\u00a0(Ore.) voted against the nomination.<\/p>\n

The Senate’s vote comes two days after Sen.\u00a0Chuck Grassley\u00a0(R-Iowa) ended a\u00a0nearly two-year blockade<\/a>\u00a0on the nomination, which he initially placed a hold on in June 2018.<\/p>\n

“Due to the recent actions by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) and the Attorney General to finally respond to my very longstanding oversight requests, I withdraw my objection to Mr. Evanina\u2019s nomination,” Grassley said in a statement.<\/p>\n

Grassley announced in 2018 that he was putting a hold on Evanina’s nomination because the intelligence community had been slow to respond to his oversight requests. He placed a hold on the nomination for a second time in March 2019, after the start of the new session of Congress.<\/p>\n

Grassley said at the time, and again on Monday, that he was not stonewalling Evanina’s nomination for personal reasons.<\/p>\n

“I did not question Mr. Evanina\u2019s credentials in any way, and I put my statement of those reasons in the Record. I have done that consistently, not only since the rules of the Senate first required every Member to do that but even before that rule was put in place,” Grassley said Monday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Senate voted Wednesday to confirm...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24460","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-u-s-a"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24460","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24460"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24460\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24461,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24460\/revisions\/24461"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24460"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24460"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24460"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}