Jay Rockefeller: “I rise to commend and thank Mike Davidson for his decades of extraordinarily dedicated and consequential service to our…”

“I rise to commend and thank Mike Davidson for his decades of extraordinarily dedicated and consequential service to our Nation, most recently as the general counsel for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence over the past 8 years. Many others have praised the wise, discerning, and sound counsel that has characterized every step of Mike's distinguished career, from his time in the Peace Corps in Kenya in the mid-1960s throughout his decades of service since then: as a litigator for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, as a professor of clinical law at the State University of New York at Buffalo, as chief staff counsel for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, as the first legal counsel of the Senate, and, following his first retirement from the Senate in 1995, as counsel for several important public initiatives--including, most prominently, serving as general counsel for the Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities Before and After the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001. This exceptionally distinguished record speaks for itself, and in 2003 it led me to recruit Mike back to full-time service in the Senate. As the Intelligence Committee's vice chairman at the time, I asked Mike to serve as the committee's minority counsel, a position he held from 2003 through 2006. When I became the committee's chairman in 2007, I asked Mike to undertake the duties of general counsel.…”