Lapdog shows teeth: In late May, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Peter Hoekstra (R-Michigan) sent a letter to President Bush warning him about keeping government spy operations secret from the Congress:

In a sharply worded letter to President Bush in May, an important Congressional ally charged that the administration might have violated the law by failing to inform Congress of some secret intelligence programs and risked losing Republican support on national security matters.

The letter from [Hoekstra] did not specify the intelligence activities that he believed had been hidden from Congress.

But Mr. Hoekstra, who was briefed on and supported the National Security Agency’s domestic surveillance program and the Treasury Department’s tracking of international banking transactions, clearly was referring to programs that have not been publicly revealed.

Recently, after the harsh criticism from Mr. Hoekstra, intelligence officials have appeared at two closed committee briefings to answer questions from the chairman and other members. The briefings appear to have eased but not erased the concerns of Mr. Hoekstra and other lawmakers about whether the administration is sharing information on all of its intelligence operations.

This begs a question:

Question: does Hoekstra really want to oversee what the Administration is doing or is he distancing himself from the nastiness that will eventually come out?

The Times posted a PDF of the letter here.