Once favored to be the House intelligence committee chairman, Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-FL) has given up his bid for the spot, as CQ predicted.

Upon emerging from his meeting with soon-to-be House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Hastings released the following statement:

"I have been informed by the Speaker-elect that I will not serve as the Chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in the 110th Congress. I am obviously disappointed with this decision. As we learn in Ecclesiastes, however, for everything there is a season.

"I have been honored to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives for the past 14 years and look forward to having this privilege for many, many more years to come.

More -- including the "hater" quip -- after the jump.

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Congressional Quarterly's Tim Starks has the scoop:

House Speaker-elect Nancy Pelosi was to meet with Rep. Alcee L. Hastings late Tuesday to close the door on his bid to become chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, a congressional aide said.

But Pelosi, D-Calif., has not yet decided who will get the job, according to the aide. . . .

Pelosi met with Harman two weeks ago to discuss the House Intelligence Committee chair job. There is little to suggest Pelosi will reverse her intention to replace Harman atop the panel.

"Stay away from Kevin Gordon. He's hot. He is using your name in Hialeah."

If they consider the issue at all, Americans probably expect the person in charge of overseeing their nation's spies to be smart, insightful and thorough -- but above all else, he or she must be able to keep a secret. As the debate builds over who will next lead the House intelligence committee, at least one conservative publication has asked whether the Democrats' presumptive pick, Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-FL), has whispered secrets that ruined federal investigations.

When the House impeached federal judge Alcee Hastings in 1989, 16 of the 17 counts had to do with a bribery allegation dating to 1981, as we detailed yesterday. But one count was different, the National Review's Byron York noted a few days ago, and it cuts to the very core of whether Hastings is suitable to chair the House intelligence committee.

It was an accusation that in 1985, he leaked secret government information that ruined three FBI probes.

The House voted to impeach Hastings on that count, known as "Article XVI," but the Senate unanimously voted to acquit, blasting the House prosecutors for using "weak" evidence, leaving "gaping holes" in their proof and "fail[ing]. . . to identify any credible motive" for Hastings to leak the information.

What happened? Did Hastings leak a secret? Or was the case as weak as the senators said?

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As we've noted, the debate over Nancy Pelosi's likely candidate for House intelligence chairman, Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-FL), centers on corruption allegations dating back to 1981 -- allegations which Hastings has fought tooth and nail.

This Monday, Hastings sent a five-page letter out to all House Democrats detailing why the charges against him are false. In it, he rails against journalists and pundits who've covered the allegations against him as ill-informed and too keen to attribute the House's impeachment and Senate's conviction of him as proof enough. Above all, he points to the fact that he was acquitted of wrongdoing in a criminal trial, which he believes has been downplayed. "In a jury trial, the evidence is the only consideration," Hastings writes. "In an impeachment, politics is central."

Full text below the fold...

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In my earlier post on Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-FL), I mentioned a cryptic conversation between the onetime federal judge and his friend which authorities later claimed was a "coded" dialog.

I linked to a Nov. 1 article by Roger Shuy, an academic specialist in linguistics and code. In the piece, Shuy identifies himself as the expert Congress asked to review the FBI recording of Hastings' odd chat and determine if he was really talking in code or not.

Shuy determined that he was. Read the post; it's a good story, and the expert's reasoning is interesting to follow.

I just got off the phone with Shuy, who has since left Washington for the wide Western expanses which, he said, are ideal for writing books.

"I always liked Alcee Hastings," Shuy told me. "When they asked me to do this, I said, 'Okay, but I hope you're wrong.' But I don't think they were."

He may not be a former spy, but he's got better cred on intelligence issues than the outgoing House intelligence committee chair, Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI). (Hoekstra's off-kilter ramblings have included charging CIA employees are al Qaeda sympathizers, and insisting WMDs still exist in Iraq after the White House has dropped the cause.) Besides, despite having little background in the cloak-and-dagger world, Hastings is said to have boned up on the subject since joining the intelligence panel in 1999.

So why do people think Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-FL) isn't fit to lead the House intelligence committee?

The answer lies all the way back in 1981 -- when James Watt became Secretary of the Interior, the Berlin Wall was still up, disco wasn't yet ironic, and Alcee Hastings was a federal judge in Florida.

That year, according to Congress, Hastings and a friend tried to shake down a defendant facing trial in Hastings' courtroom for $150,000. In exchange, the two promised a reduced jail sentence and the return of over $800,000 in confiscated property.

A jury acquitted Hastings of criminal charges stemming from the scandal, but in 1989 a team of lawmakers -- including Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), among others -- prosecuted Hastings in Congress, and the Senate voted to strip him of his judgeship.

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Didn't the Democrats promise us an end to muck?

Yet mucked-up politicians keep surfacing as the new House majority struggles to choose its leaders. Last week, questionable corporate cozier Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-MD) beat out Rep. John "No bribes for me -- right now" Murtha (D-PA) to be House majority leader.

Now, a battle royale is brewing over who's going to lead the House intelligence committee, and it too is hardly muck-free: one of the leading contenders for the position is a former federal judge who was impeached by Congress, while the other is under FBI investigation for improper relations with a lobby organization sporting foreign ties.

Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-FL), with backing from the Congressional Black Caucus, may be the frontrunner for the position, if only because the would-be chair, Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA), is on the outs with the woman who gets to choose, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

But Hastings has a past that seriously compromises his candidacy: In 1989, the Senate found Hastings guilty of soliciting a $150,000 bribe from defendants facing trial in his courtroom eight years earlier. Unlike some recent scandals, this was believed to have been a pretty simple scam: In exchange for the bribe, Hastings would throw the case.

Hastings' alleged accomplice, William Borders, was sent to prison for the scam. The evidence against Hastings himself was serious, but circumstantial -- a cryptic phone call, a fortuitous appearance at a restaurant on a certain date and time -- so he was acquitted of criminal charges. But a bipartisan congressional prosecution and impeachment removed him from the federal bench. (More on this later.)

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