GOP Woman Candidate Announces

For John, BLUF:  Chances not good, but would be a good President.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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"The CEO and the CIA"

Ms Carly Fiorina and the Intelligence Community, by Reporter Jim Geraghty, of National Review.

One week after 9/11, Michael Hayden, the director of the National Security Agency, the electronic surveillance arm of the U.S. government, had a long list of problems.  High on the list was the fact that the NSA needed a ton of new high-tech equipment, particularly servers, right away, to handle a vastly expanded, critically important workload.

Hayden called up the CEO of Hewlett Packard, Carly Fiorina.  “HP made precisely the equipment we needed, and we needed in bulk,” says Robert Deitz, who was general counsel at the NSA from 1998 to 2006.  Deitz recalls that a tractor-trailer full of HP servers and other equipment was on the Washington, D.C. Beltway, en route to retailers, at the very moment Hayden called.  Fiorina instructed her team to postpone the retailer delivery and have the driver stop.  An NSA police car met up with the tractor-trailer and the truck proceeded, with an armed escort, to NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland.

When Michael Hayden moved to CIA he created an external advisory board, which included Ms Fiorina.  She rose to be chairman.  And she was a consensus builder.

I don't think Ms Fiorina is a light weight.  At this point I will avoid invidious comparisons.

Read the whole thing.

Regards  —  Cliff