Senators John McCain Joseph Lieberman and twenty-nine of their colleagues are asking are asking embattled Attorney General Eric Holder to appoint a special counsel to investigate a recent string of national security leaks that appear to be coming from the executive branch. In their letter to Holder the two also make a suggestion about who the leaker may be and suggest Thomas Donilon the current National Security Adviser to President Obama.
So who is Thomas Donilon? He was a registered lobbyist and Executive Vice President for Law and Policy at Fannie Mae from 1999 to 2005. Obviously His appointment to the Obama transition team and current position as an adviser runs counter to candidate Obama’s promise of an administration without the influence of lobbyists. Before that he was chief of staff for President Clinton’s Secretary of State.
He has no military or intelligence experience and there are reports of Donilon having run-ins with his predecessor Jim Jones and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. Part of the speculation surrounding Donilon comes from the many on-the-record comments he made for the book Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power by David Sanger. The book also notes that Robert Gates also told Donilon to ‘Shut the F— Up’ over the national security teams blabbing about the raid to kill Osama bin Laden.
There is an interesting passage from a June 7th article on The Daily Caller about the leaks from Retired US Army Colonel Ken Allard who had this to say about Donilon:
Like Thomas Donilon, for example, the current national security advisor. Both in Sanger’s book and Bob Woodward’s Obama’s Wars, Donilon is conspicuous for his rigorous self-promotion and hyper-political willingness to force the national security establishment to hew the administration line. You never know the facts until you do the investigation: But Donilon’s West Wing office is a good place to begin. As a young officer investigating security crimes in the Army equivalent of the FBI, I learned a vital lesson: Conspiracies break only when you give people compelling reasons to tell the truth.
Meanwhile conservative commentator and former Ronald Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan summed up Donilon recently saying: “Liberally quoted in the Sanger book is the White House national security adviser, Thomas Donilon. When I was a child, there was a doll called Chatty Cathy. You pulled a string in her back, and she babbled inanely. Tom Donilon appears to be the Chatty Cathy of the American intelligence community.”
