President Obama has nominated Shirley Woodward, a partner of a major law firm and a former CIA intelligence officer, to fill the role of inspector general of the Central Intelligence Agency, an internal watchdog post that has been empty since early 2015.
Obama announced Woodward’s nomination Thursday, noting that the previous IG, David Buckley, had resigned. Buckley left the position in January of last year, according to the Project on Government Oversight, which tracks IG vacancies in presidential administrations.
Woodward most recently served as a partner in the litigation and controversy practice at Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr. She first joined the firm in 2001 as an associate and spent a year as associate general counsel and chief Iraq inspector for the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the U.S. Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction.
Before joining WilmerHale, she clerked for Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and had previously served as an intelligence operations officer at the CIA from 1985 to 1997.
The CIA IG office recently came under fire for “mistakenly” destroying its only copy of the 6,700-page Senate Torture Report, the result of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s exhaustive investigation into the CIA’s history of brutal interrogation techniques.
Acting Inspector General Christopher Sharpley uploaded the report to the office’s internal computer network and then destroyed the hard disk, apparently following standard protocol, the news Yahoo News reported. Then, someone else in the watchdog’s office reportedly misconstrued Justice Department instructions not to open the file and deleted it from the server.
CIA Director John Brennan appears to have refused to provide another copy and Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., the main author of the report when she was Intelligence Committee chair, has asked him to hand over a new copy.
The Project on Government Oversight issued a report last year showing the Obama administration’s average time for filling IG vacancies is twice that of some past administrations despite the president’s pledge to clean up Washington and run the most transparent executive branch in history.
Under Reagan, the average time was 224 days; under George H.W. Bush, it was 337 days; for Bill Clinton it was 453 days; and under George W. Bush, it was 280 days. Obama’s average stands at 613 days, according to the most recent research POGO compiled in June of last year.
POGO and other watchdog groups argue that leaving IG position open or unfilled, means that their offices are run by acting IGs, who cannot operate as independently because they are not Senate confirmed and owe their position to top officials at the agencies they are supposed to be overseeing.
The State Department went for five years with an acting IG, the entire duration of Clinton’s tenure as secretary of State. Watchdog groups, including the non-partisan Sunlight Foundation, have said that Obama bears direct responsibility for a lax ethics environment that may have allowed Clinton to establish a private server and use it for all official business without any government accountability.
