Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I support the confirmation of the President's nominee to be the first inspector general of the intelligence community, Irvin Charles McCullough III. The position of Inspector General of the Intelligence Community--or ICIG--was created in the fiscal year 2010 Intelligence Authorization Act, after several years of effort to have the position enacted. The reason to have a Community-wide inspector general is similar to the reason to have a Director of National Intelligence. The ICIG is intended to review, and conduct oversight on, intelligence activities across the 16 agencies that make up the intelligence community, as well as the Office of the DNI, instead of having every agency--and its IG--operate within its own stovepipe. In recent years, the intelligence agencies have worked more closely together. This has improved performance and reduced duplication, but it has also made the oversight work of individual agency inspectors general more difficult. The Intelligence Committee saw there was a need to create an inspector general with authority and oversight of the entire intelligence community, and one who could look at issues that cut across individual agencies. That view was reinforced by the relative weakness of the inspector general position in the Office of the DNI that was authorized as part of the Intelligence Reform Act of 2004.…”