The FEC hits Joe Biden with a $219,000 fine for accepting illegal campaign donations.

The acting director of national intelligence responds to The Washington Post’s allegations about the intelligence community’s lack of coordination.

Alvin Greene gives his first public campaign speech, doesn’t mention action figures.

John McCain applauds “wonderful missiles.”

Nobody wants to associate with Tea Party Express’ Mark Williams.

Joe Biden says Republican strategy is just “repeal and repeat.”

Good David Ignatius column on What James Clapper’s Nomination Means:

The DNI flap has been fascinating in what it shows about Obama’s approach to intelligence. He wants facts, not commentary; he mistrusts aides such as Blair who let their personal opinions show, and he correspondingly values low-key colleagues such as Gates; he wants to oversee intelligence not from a separate fiefdom but from inside the White House, where former CIA official John Brennan serves as deputy national security adviser.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), read this column. Ignatius’s insightful observation indicates that your problem isn’t whether Clapper is an obstacle to a strong director of national intelligence. It’s whether John Brennan and President Obama are those obstacles. Institutional powers matter. They matter a lot. But unless the structure of the intelligence community changes radically, the strongest you can make the job is akin to a powerful congressional committee chair, not a cabinet secretary, to use the formulation of Defense Secretary Robert Gates, a former CIA director. More radical changes would require a presidential commitment, and clearly Obama would prefer intelligence to be ultimately answerable to John Brennan at the White House. Accordingly, that’s going to be the official to whom the leadership of the intelligence agencies look to for their cues, whether or not Clapper gets confirmed and no matter what Clapper tells Feinstein when they parley in the coming days.

“I have concerns about Clapper as a choice,” committee chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, D-CA, told The Cable in an interview, saying that the widely expected nomination of Clapper, who now is under secretary of defense for intelligence, would give the military too much control of the intelligence community. “The best thing for intelligence is to have a civilian in charge. The elbows are less sharp.”

In a bit of irony that surely warms hearts at Langley, Feinstein’s choice for the nation’s top intelligence post is — wait for it — Leon Panetta, the CIA director whose nomination Feinstein initially fought hard to scuttle. I suppose you could be cute and suggest that Feinstein secretly just wants the bureaucratic meatgrinder that is the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to finally grind Panetta’s flesh and bones. But most likely she’s just been impressed by his job as CIA director.

And so has Kit Bond (R-Mo.), the committee’s GOP vice chairman. Rogin further reports that there’s no daylight between the committee leaders on who they want for Blair’s job. Panetta is “the only one who has the clout to make it work,” Bond told Rogin, “I have reservations about [Clapper] in that job.”

Does Clapper’s (possible, prospective, never official) candidacy survive public opposition from the leadership of the Senate committee that will have to approve him?

Many of the murmurings I’ve heard from intelligence veterans have concerned the untenability of the DNI position, an intended fix to the old CIA-centric intelligence leadership that’s created an odd hybrid of management over 16 agencies without correlative budgetary authority and a perhaps naive distance from active intelligence operations. If people on TV are upset that a series of failed-but-attempted domestic terrorist attacks have happened on “Blair’s watch,” as I’ve heard more than one cable pundit say over the past 18 hours, they’re misunderstanding the DNI. S/he’s not supposed to prevent those attempts from happening. S/he’s supposed to organize, structure and resource the intelligence community so relevant agencies can prevent those attempts from happening. That’s why the Senate intelligence committee report that found a disorganized National Counterterrorism Center — something the DNI is responsible for — was damaging. What the DNI should also be doing is focusing the intelligence community around answering why these domestic terror attempts are happening, particularly using American citizens as operatives.

If that operational distance sounds untenable, that might be because five years of unhappy experience since the 9/11 Commission sought greater intelligence consolidation is prompting a re-think in intelligence circles. When I asked a veteran career intelligence officer with experience in various intel agencies what he made of Blair’s departure, the response I got back started with “Good!” Like several intelligence officers who serve out in the dangerous parts of the world, the prospect of an increasingly top-heavy bureaucracy distanced from field concerns is an unpleasant one.

“Blair’s biggest move was to try to grab turf from CIA over station chiefs, instead of doing serious work like developing a plan to better integrate [intelligence community] bureaucracies, where joint-minded personnel and promotion policies could create positive change. But that’s hard work and not sexy,” the intelligence officer emailed. “The current system creates bureaucrats whose focus is building their empire — more bodies, more money — all in the name of national security. His position was created to fix the intelligence bureaucratic failures, but growing bureaucracies to fix bureaucracies is a losing bet.”

In fairness to Blair, you can find an effort at “joint-minded personnel and promotion policies” — or, at the least, a commitment to the idea of them — in his August 2009 National Intelligence Strategy (PDF).

But don’t expect either the Obama administration or Congress to have any appetite for root-and-branch restructuring of the DNI position. That would be a major structural reform five years after the last major structural reform, and the national agenda is already too clogged to tolerate such a thing. Instead, expect the confirmation hearings of whoever ultimately replaces Blair to be a colloquy on what statutory changes are necessary to make the Office of the Director of National Intelligence a more coherent structure.

Whether that’s ultimately a laudable goal is up for debate. In 2007, a former senior intelligence analyst, Robert Hutchings, testified to Congress that the creation of the DNI itself reflected what he called a “Coordination Myth” about intelligence. That myth, he said, was

that it is somehow possible to “coordinate” the work of hundreds of thousands of people across dozens of agencies operating in nearly every country of the world. Anyone who has worked in complex organizations knows, or should know, that it is possible to coordinate only a few select activities and that there are always tradeoffs, because every time you coordinate some activities you are simultaneously weakening coordination among others. To cite just one example, the creation of the National Counterterrorism Center may have enhanced interagency coordination among terrorist operators, which is a good thing, but it has surely weakened coordination between them and the country and regional experts. The net result is that the Intelligence Community is probably stronger in tactical counter- terrorist coordination but is surely weaker in strategic counterterrorism. While we are looking for the next car bomb, we may be missing the next generation of terrorist threats.

Anyone observing the current debates over drone strikes, increased radicalization and their relationship surely recognizes the current relevance of Hutchings’ fear. When I asked him what he thought about the next DNI, he quipped, “Please quash those burgeoning rumors that I will be tapped.”

Assuming the report pans out — and I doubt it wouldn’t — it’s telling that President Obama will have fired an intelligence chief after several low-grade attempted terrorist attacks failed but President Bush didn’t fire his after a major domestic terrorist attack succeeded.

It is alarming to hear that the Obama administration is asserting that the president can authorize the assassination of Americans abroad, even if they are far from any battlefield and may have never taken up arms against the U.S., but have only been deemed to constitute an unspecified “threat.” This is the most recent consequence of a troublingly overbroad interpretation of Congress’s 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force. This sweeping interpretation envisions a war that knows no borders or definable time limits and targets an enemy that the government has refused to define in public. This policy is particularly troubling since it targets U.S. citizens, who retain their constitutional right to due process even when abroad.

His colleague Jonathan Manes wants to know more:

The American people have a right to know more about a policy that grants the president the unilateral authority to approve the killing of U.S. citizens. It is essential that more information be made available about who can be targeted for killing, who makes these decisions and on the basis of how much evidence, and whether lethal force can be used if arrest or capture are possible or have not been attempted. While there is little doubt that a U.S. citizen fighting for an enemy army could lawfully be killed on the battlefield in the course of fighting, this policy goes far beyond the ordinary parameters of battlefield combat. It appears to allow for the deliberate targeted killing of American citizens far away from any active hostilities, as long as the executive branch determines unilaterally that they meet a secret definition of who the enemy is.

“Some of the plots disrupted since 9/11 have involved attacks on a smaller scale than those in 2001, but the most recent plot for which we knew the target was the London-based aviation plot in 2006, which involved mid-air attacks on multiple aircraft,” Blair said in his annual congressional briefing on threats to the country. Nice and caveated. But there’s progress: “We can take it as a sign of the progress that while complex, multiple cell-based attacks could still occur, we are making them very difficult to pull off.”

At the same time, the recent successful and attempted attacks represent an evolving threat in which it is even more difficult to identify and track small numbers of terrorists recently recruited and trained and short- term plots than to find and follow terrorist cells engaged in plots that have been ongoing for years.

Third, while such attacks can do a significant amount of damage, terrorists aiming against the Homeland have not, as yet, been able to attack us with chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear weapons.

Recent disrupted plots, Blair continued, provide clues as to possible targets for attack in the United States: “the Metro system in Washington D.C., bridges, gas infrastructure, reservoirs, residential complexes, and public venues for large gatherings.” Another avenue of potential vulnerability: “We cannot rule out that al-Qa’ida’s interest in damaging the US economy might lead the group to opt for more modest, even ‘low-tech,’ but still high-impact, attacks affecting key economic sectors.” (At the risk of being macabre, AIG’s new bonuses might even make those attacks poll well. … OK, I’ll stop.)

Finally, homegrown Muslim extremism appears to be on the rise. But it has more to do with spreading extremist ideology than actually contributing to attacks, Blair said.

Altogether, a picture of a determined terrorist network, but with significantly reduced capabilities than existed on 9/11.

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian man accused of trying to blow up a jetliner bound for Detroit on Dec. 25, started talking to investigators after two of his family members arrived in the United States and helped earn his cooperation, a senior administration official said Tuesday evening.

And second:

America’s top intelligence official told lawmakers on Tuesday that Al Qaeda and its affiliates had made it a high priority to attempt a large-scale attack on American soil within the next six months.

The assessment by Dennis C. Blair, the director of national intelligence, was much starker than his view last year, when he emphasized the considerable progress in the campaign to debilitate Al Qaeda and said that the global economic meltdown, rather than the prospect of a major terrorist attack, was the “primary near-term security concern of the United States.”

No threat determination like that is ever the result of one line of intelligence. But it’s impossible to believe Abdulmutallab’s resumed cooperation — the subject of heavy administration pushback to its critics, as Josh Marshall observes, after two weeks of attack following Blair’s disastrous congressional testimony — did not inform the assessment. The Times:

Another federal official said Mr. Abdulmutallab had provided information about people he met in Yemen, where he is believed to have receiving training and explosives from Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, a branch of the terrorist network.

“He’s retracing his activities over there,” said the official, who would discuss the case only on the condition of anonymity. “You run to ground what he tells you, validate it and follow up. You build a relationship. It’s a pretty standard process.”

And that cooperation would not have come without Abdulmutallab’s family trying to get him the best deal they can from federal prosecutors. Welcome to a law-enforcement-informed approach to terrorism.

While many senior Agency officers have tested proficient in a foreign language over the course of their careers, some have not kept their skills current. Under the new policy, promotions to SIS for most analysts and operations officers will be contingent on demonstrating foreign language competency. If an officer is promoted to SIS and does not meet the foreign language requirement within one year, he or she will return to their previous, lower grade. This is a powerful incentive to maintain and improve skills critical to the Agency’s global mission. Languages play a key role in the CIA’s work at all career levels.

“The stricter requirement for SIS promotion,” said Panetta, “is meant to ensure that leadership on this vital initiative comes from the executive level. With an unwavering commitment from SIS officers—to both lead by example and to support language proficiency at all levels—we will reach not only our language goals, but our ultimate objective: an Agency that is better positioned to protect our nation in the years ahead.”