Oversight Quotes

Accountability begins with transparency.

Our Presidents should not be able to conduct secret operations which violate our principles, jeopardize our rights, and have not been subject to the checks and balances which normally keep policies in line

First, God made idiots, but that was just for practice. Then he made school boards.

War is best left to the Generals. I believe in letting the military authorities manage the army. If they manage it badly, we shall make a bad matter worse by tampering and interfering.

Accountability goes hand in hand with reform.

Praise in public; rebuke in private.

We don’t have to choose between preserving privacy and preventing terrorism. We do have to decide how much oversight and accountability there should be when the government conducts surveillance on its citizens.

Time was when an incompetent Governor could not be permitted among men. He was, and had to be, by one method or the other, clutched up from his place at the helm of affairs, and hurled down into the hold, perhaps even overboard, if he could not really steer. And we call those ages barbarous, because they shuddered to see a Phantasm at the helm of their affairs

What have you done with the garden that was entrusted to you?

In order to do vigorous oversight, the leadership of the intelligence community has got to be straight with the American people and straight with the Congress. For there to be vigorous oversight, the intelligence community's got to be straight with the American people and the Congress and that has not been the case.

There will always be mistakes, all teams make mistakes.

We thought we would get around to it sometime down the line. Theoretically we could have regulated it, but it wasn't on our radar screen.

If National Security Agency (NSA) heads fundamentally lack an understanding of what constitutes constitutionally protected communications, or worse, chose to disregard those directives, then it's time for the appropriate heads of these agencies to resign.

Congress’ duty to the voters requires it to monitor how military appropriations are spent and to investigate the army’s failures if it was not willing to investigate itself. What are we to do? Sit idle during all the period that the [Civil] war is in progress?

The industrial revolution was accomplished by a group of financial titans, whose methods were not scrutinized with too much care, and who were honored in proportion as they produced the results, irrespective of the means they used.

If the presidency is the head of the American body politic, Congress is its gastrointestinal tract. Its vast and convoluted inner workings may be mysterious and unpleasant, but in the end they excrete a great deal of material whose successful passage is crucial to our nation's survival.

I am wrong all the time.

I got more whistleblowers from the Secret Service than I do anywhere else. And if you look at that department and agency, it's the one place you can never, ever, ever make a mistake - ever.

ACCOUNTABILITY, n. The mother of caution.

Governmental officials -- including those whose principal duty is to enforce the law --have violated or ignored the law over long periods of time and have advocated and defended their right to break the law. The Constitutional system of checks and balances has not adequately controlled intelligence activities

I have always told my subordinates that when they commit any mistakes, the blame must be laid on the superior officers.

Independence sounds good in theory, but in practice, it is mutually exclusive with accountability. The more independence you give a prosecutor, the less you make that prosecutor accountable to the public and regular checks and balances.

I had the gravest forebodings about this organization and warned the President that as set up, neither he, the National Security Council, nor anyone else would be in a position to know what it was doing or control it.

How hard I find it to see what is right in front of my eyes!

Errors are not in the art but in the artificers.