Phil Mudd Resurfaces, After Senate Dissed Him

You thought Phil Mudd was done? Months ago, Mudd, the chief of the FBI’s national security branch and a respected longtime CIA official, was forced to withdraw his name as Janet Napolitano’s nominee for intelligence chief of the Department of Homeland Security. Mudd bowed out in June after some Congressional staffers muttered to the press that Mudd had some kind of knowledge of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation program, something that has never been either specified or substantiated. And that was the last we heard from Mudd in public.

But on Wednesday, Mudd will speak for the first time since his Homeland Security confirmation debacle, on a subject well within his area of expertise. He’s scheduled to give a lunchtime speech, “Al Qaeda: The Domestic Threat,” at a panel assembled by the New America Foundation. Presumably Mudd will talk about the prospect of domestic infiltration or radicalization of American Muslims like Najibullah Zazi. Almost as if his intelligence experience could have come in handy at the Department of Homeland Security…