It’s not clear why that communication didn’t occur. As Fisher writes, President Obama has stated that he believes the Director of National Intelligence — his principal intelligence adviser — needs to head the community. But in practice, he hasn’t taken any measures to strengthen the office’s statutory authorities, leading me to think that the White House doesn’t see any political upside in a major intelligence overhaul barely five years after the last one. The major advocate for such an overhaul is Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the chairwoman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. And she probably wants to see the PIAB report in full.

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.

The long statement conspicuously withholds approval for Clapper’s nomination. “I am very much in favor of a strong DNI, which I believe to be essential to national security,” Feinstein clarifies, and to that end, she says she wants to hear what Clapper thinks of the expanded authorities for the job that she put in last year’s intelligence bill. (The relevant sections begin with Section 303, for those keeping score.) Before she takes up Clapper’s nomination in committee — “we are now preparing questions,” she pledges ominously — she wants the committee to finalize next year’s intelligence bill, and strongly hints that bill will contain provisions that give the nation’s top intelligence chief greater authority over the Defense Department intelligence assets Clapper currently overseas.

Key to Clapper’s nomination, Feinstein hints, is his answer to “whether he believes a stronger DNI would weaken the authorities of the Secretary of Defense.” That’s the oversight equivalent of a well-forecast high inside fastball. But Clapper hinted in April that he doesn’t believe a DNI should hit for power. I’m going to stop this metaphor. But clearly the central question surrounding Clapper’s prospects for becoming DNI is, to put it cynically, whether he’ll tell Feinstein what she wants to hear.

The full statement follows:

“I intend to meet with General James R. Clapper in the next couple of days to discuss his nomination to be the next Director of National Intelligence. In line with the standard Committee process for reviewing nominees, we are now preparing questions for General Clapper to answer before we will hold a confirmation hearing.

I intend for the Committee to do its due diligence on General Clapper’s nomination, as we do for all nominees. I am particularly interested in his views on the powers of the DNI, the appropriate role of the DNI with respect to agencies within the Department of Defense, and his views on the importance and appropriate role of congressional oversight of intelligence.

I believe that any DNI will be effective only if he has the authority – both on paper and in practice – to oversee and have strategic direction over the 16 agencies that make up the Intelligence Community. I am very much in favor of a strong DNI, which I believe to be essential to national security. The Fiscal Year 2010 Intelligence Authorization bill provides additional authorities and flexibilities for the DNI, and I will ask General Clapper his view of those provisions, and whether he believes a stronger DNI would weaken the authorities of the Secretary of Defense.

The Intelligence Authorization bill is the Committee’s top priority right now. We have already begun to review General Clapper’s record, and I would intend to take up his nomination once the authorization bill is passed.”

If you scour MSN CareerBuilder — in employee searches as in other endeavors, the agency casts a wide net — you’ll find the NSA advertising its need for a new top lawyer. Potential candidates will “Interpret all statutes, Presidential Directives, and Executive and Legislative Branch Regulations, and provide legal advice and counsel to the Director and Senior Leadership Team with respect to the authorities for NSA/CSS cryptologic activities and the conditions and restrictions thereon.” So it’s not just James Clapper, the undersecretary of defense for intelligence, who may get a new senior intelligence job shortly.

What this means for NSA operations is unclear. Just last week, Director Keith Alexander gave a rare speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies that underscored the centrality of lawyers to the agency’s wide-ranging surveillance operations. “Every action that we take,” Alexander said, “we have legal reviews of it all the way up and down.” I’m awaiting formal comment from NSA on the vacancy and the circumstances behind it; presumably it has an acting general counsel in place.

And this is a delicate time for NSA to be without a senior legal adviser. Last month, the military officially created the first-ever military command to operate in cyberspace, U.S. Cyber Command, and it’s co-located with the NSA at Fort Meade in Maryland. (Alexander is also Cyber Command’s first leader.) In April, the former director of national intelligence, Dennis Blair, conceded that the legal and policy authorities distinguishing Cyber Command from the intelligence community have yet to be fleshed out.

“The absence of a general counsel introduces a shade of uncertainty into the process which needs to be correct,” said Steve Aftergood, an intelligence policy expert at the Federation of American Scientists. “NSA operations are law-intensive activities. They don’t make a move without clearing it with their legal people.”

“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?

Speaking of Blair’s replacement, Feinstein doesn’t come out and say it, but her statement gives a cold shoulder to James Clapper, the Pentagon’s intelligence chief and Blair’s deputy for Defense intelligence, who’s reportedly the leading candidate for the job. “It will be important that any nominee is not beholden to the Pentagon’s interests and can, as needed, provide balance to civilian and military interests in carrying out the nation’s intelligence missions,” Feinstein said in the statement.

No one agency, particularly the Department of Defense, should control the flow of intelligence to the President. The majority of the intelligence budget is already executed by the Department of Defense, and it will always have a strong influence over the Intelligence Community’s operation. That should be balanced, however, by the need for the community to provide strategic intelligence beyond what is necessary for the warfighter.

On the one hand, Feinstein also opposed Leon Panetta’s appointment as CIA director until she got an assurance — in the form of Steve Kappes staying on as deputy director (he recently announced his retirement) — that Panetta wouldn’t jeopardize her prerogatives. On the other, Feinstein didn’t announce any opposition before Panetta’s nomination was announced.

That problem is coming to pass. Last month, reports Mark Mazzetti at The New York Times, McConnell’s successor, Dennis Blair, told the community that he, and not CIA Director Leon Panetta, would select the top intelligence official overseas, possibly from agencies other than the CIA. Panetta told the CIA to ignore Blair. The White House is now working to adjudicate the dispute, but to some degree, the turf battle is the result of vagaries in the 2004 law that created the director of national intelligence. According to Mazzetti, Blair has greater congressional support:

“We need to move intelligence away from the cold war mind-set, and the C.I.A. has a problem to some extent accepting that,” said Senator Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who is chairwoman of the Intelligence Committee.

Blair appears not to be fighting for control of Pentagon-based intelligence assets — like the spy satellites of the National Reconnaisance Office or the vast cryptological apparatus of the National Security Agency — with Defense Secretary Bob Gates, even though the Pentagon is estimated to control between 85 and 90 percent of the intelligence budget. Frequent battles for intelligence-community supremacy between CIA Director George Tenet and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld characterized President George W. Bush’s first term. Gates and McConnell attempted to resolve the inherent bureaucratic tension by making the Pentagon’s chief of intelligence and the director of national intelligence’s chief of defense intelligence the same person, a retired Air Force general named James Clapper, who continues to serve as undersecretary of defense for intelligence.

Speculation: This may be a case where the dispute is resolved — temporarily at least — by John Brennan, the White House’s counterterrorism adviser, whom President Obama initially wanted to become CIA director before Glenn Greenwald and other progressives questioned his commitment to ending torture. If so, Brennan will demonstrate that while Blair and Panetta fight it out, he’s the actual center of gravity within the intelligence community.