White House to Feinstein: Yeah, we apologize for that illegal prisoner swap

With even liberal legal talking heads saying they broke the law by trading five Guantanamo Bay detainees for Bowe Bergdahl - and not informing Congress in advance - the White House is copping (sort of) to it by apologizing to Dianne Feinstein, chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

The Hill reports:

The White House has apologized to Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) for failing to alert her in advance of a decision to release Taliban commanders from Guantanamo Bay. Feinstein told reporters that she received a call from Deputy National Security Adviser Tony Blinken on Monday evening apologizing for what the administration is calling an “oversight." "I had a call from the White House last night, from Tony Blinken, apologizing for it,” she said. “He apologized and said it was an oversight,” she added. Feinstein also said leaders of the House and Senate Intelligence panels were almost unanimously against a prisoner trade when it came up in 2011.

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She said the chairmen and ranking Republicans of the “connected committees” spent a lot of time in 2011 reviewing the possibility of a prisoner swap and came out firmly opposed to releasing senior militants from the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay. “There were very strong views and they were virtually unanimous against the trade,” she said. “I certainly want to know more about whether this man was a deserter,” she said of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, who was released to American special forces in return for the freedom of five senior Taliban commanders. Administration officials have said in public that they did not have time to inform Congress of the prisoner swap because Bergdahl’s life was in danger and they did not know how long the Taliban would be willing to wait to finalize the deal. Now first let's deal with the B.S. language here. If it was an "oversight," that means you just forgot to do it. How can you square that with the claim that they didn't have time because they thought his life was in danger? You can't. Either it's one, it's the other, or it's something else entirely - and the latter is the bet here. As Feinstein indicates here, when this came up in 2011, no one in Congress thought it was a good idea. Not the Republicans. Not the Democrats. Not anyone. The White House obviously remembered that, and knew they would get major resistance in Congress if they went back and consulted again. So they simply decided it would be better to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission, and they went ahead and did the deal. Now they basically acknowledge that, yeah, they broke the law by not informing Congress. But they said they're sorry! So that makes it all better, right? Maybe all those conservative groups getting harrassed by the IRS should just say they're sorry, and based on the standard the White House wants applied to itself, that would make everything OK, right? Let's see if Congress actually tries to do anything about this. They certainly should.