Chris Dodd: “I thank my friend. I want to compliment my friend from Michigan on a very fine statement. He has focused, in my view…”

“I thank my friend. I want to compliment my friend from Michigan on a very fine statement. He has focused, in my view, exactly on the central question here and that is not that there was disagreement over intelligence but, rather, whether someone went beyond a good, healthy fight over whether or not intelligence was accurate and took additional steps to dismiss or to change the jobs of the individuals involved. I appreciate my colleague calling into question the access of information because this is central. That is why this Senator has taken the extraordinary step of asking my colleagues to potentially oppose a motion to invoke cloture on this nomination if the information is not forthcoming. The reason I want to raise this is because our good friend from Kansas, the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, read into the Record a letter he sent to Senator Lugar regarding this request for the intercept information. And the pertinent paragraph, to this Senator, I want to read quickly. It says: Finally, the Vice Chairman and I reviewed all ten documents containing the references to U.S. persons that generated Under Secretary Bolton's requests. The documents we reviewed did not contain the actual identities of the minimized U.S. persons. After reviewing the content of each report, however, it was apparent to us both that it was not necessary to know the actual names to determine whether [or not] the requests were proper.…”