Watson Coleman: “I will speak very briefly and yield to my colleague from Virginia. Mr. President, I would note that the chairman of the…”

“I will speak very briefly and yield to my colleague from Virginia. Mr. President, I would note that the chairman of the Intelligence Committee is here, and I suspect he will respond to some of these issues. There is just one point the distinguished Senator from West Virginia raised again and again, and I just want to make the Record very clear; that is, again, he stated that it is clear, in his words, that the Under Secretary criticized this employee ``because his analysis did not support Bolton's view.'' I want to make it clear, the record does not support that. In fact, it was very clear that John Bolton said to the intelligence analyst: You are welcome to disagree with me, but not behind my back. That is what this was about. In fact, the analyst himself gave some conflicting reasons of why he did not tell Bolton that he had tubed his language before he sent it around. He never told him that. That is what this is about. In fact, when the analyst was asked whether he disagreed with the statement ``You are welcome to disagree with me''--it is Bolton speaking to the analyst--``but not behind my back,'' his comment was, ``That does ring a bell.'' So that is what this is about. It is about process, it is not about policy. The last thing I would note is that we have had 10 hours of hearings, 35 separate staff interviews, 2 business meetings, 29 different people producing 1,000 pages of transcripts and 800 pages of documents from the State Department.…”