He's clean, he knows where the line items are buried, and the director isn't the chief spook anymore.
Posted Tuesday, Jan. 6, 2009, at 6:54 PM ET
The puzzler of the hour: Why is Barack Obama picking Leon Panetta, a former congressman and White House official with no intelligence experience, to be director of the Central Intelligence Agency?
Nothing definitive can be said here—the Obama transition team is a tight-lipped shop (the leak probably came from elsewhere)—but some inferences can be drawn.
First, Panetta was almost certainly not among the president-elect's initial list of prospects. As was widely reported, John Brennan, former director of the National Counterterrorism Center, seemed pegged for the job—he'd been candidate Obama's intelligence adviser for nearly a year—until he was linked a bit too closely to President George W. Bush's enhanced-interrogation program and so "withdrew" from the running.
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