Hoekstra plays pot and kettle with Pelosi

Rep. Pete Hoekstra, former chair of the House Intelligence Committee and candidate for governor in 2010, is outraged — outraged — that Nancy Pelosi would dare to accuse the CIA of giving less-than-comprehensive briefings or, worse yet, of lying to Congress. Those accusations, he said on CNN, are “outrageous.” And on Fox News he said, in essence, it’s one thing to criticize the CIA’s performance, but quite another to accuse them of lying. But as ThinkProgress points out, Hoekstra has accused the CIA of lying to Congress himself more than once.

Hoekstra’s repeated objections to Pelosi accusing the CIA of having lied to Congress is quite odd given the fact that he’s made nearly identical claims on multiple occasions. As Marcy Wheeler first noted, Hoekstra wrote a letter to President Bush in 2006 accusing the intelligence community of withholding information on their activities from Congress. “I have learned of some alleged Intelligence Community activities about which our committee has not been briefed,” Hoekstra wrote. He said that he believed the Bush administration’s failure to fully brief his committee could constitute “a violation of law“…

Similarly, in 2007, Hoekstra described a closed-door briefing by representatives from the intelligence community (including CIA) on the National Intelligence Estimate of Iran’s nuclear capability, saying that the members “didn’t find [the briefers] forthcoming.” More recently, in November 2008, Hoekstra concluded that the CIA “may have been lying or concealing part of the truth” in testimony to Congress regarding a 2001 incident in which the CIA mistakenly killed an American citizen in Peru. “We cannot have an intelligence community that covers up what it does and then lies to Congress,” Hoekstra said of the incident.

In related news, the pot and the kettle have just boarded a plane for Vegas, where they plan to get married.