This is just too rich.
Digging into the half-century history of a certain erratic Delaware pol, Fox News discovers that in the late 1970s, then-senator Joe Biden tanked President Jimmy Carter’s nomination of Ted Sorensen to head the CIA.
Sorensen, the confidant and speechwriter for President John F. Kennedy (and widely regarded as the author of a goodly chunk of Profiles in Courage, for which JFK won a Pulitzer Prize), retained classified documents in his home and used them, among other things, in writing a book about the Kennedy administration. This was too much for Biden, or so he said, so the senator opposed the nomination. As Fox’s Brooke Singman reports:
During Sorenson’s confirmation hearing, Biden said the “real issue” was “whether Mr. Sorensen intentionally took advantage of ambiguities in the law, or carelessly ignored the law. . . . If he did so, can he now bring the activities of the intelligence community within the strict limits of the law?” Biden asked. “We will expect that in the future of intelligence agencies. If that is to be the case, then we must hold the Director — DCI — accountable as well.”
Well, I guess there was a there there back then. If the director of central intelligence has to be held accountable, how about the president?