404 — Head of House Intelligence Committee Rogers to retire and become another conservative radio jock shock

Now, the house member who spent more time in front of TV show cameras covering intelligence than any other last year, announces he's to retire and become another Limbaughesque radio commentator, according to this story from The New York Times. His constant maligning of Snowden, and his perennial support of the IC â€” notwithstanding his recent bill, which does a half-assed job of stopping warrantless mass surveillance â€” will not be missed. Good bye and good riddance.

Representative Mike Rogers has been working to overhaul the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs.

Head of Intelligence Panel in House Says He’ll Retire to Take Job as Radio Host

By JONATHAN WEISMAN and CHARLIE SAVAGE

WASHINGTON — Representative Mike Rogers of Michigan, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, stunned colleagues on Friday by announcing he would retire to take a job as a talk radio host, just days after proposing an ambitious overhaul of the nation’s electronic surveillance programs.

“I had a career before politics and always planned to have one after,” Mr. Rogers, a Republican, said in a written statement. “The genius of our institutions is they are not dependent on the individual temporary occupants privileged to serve. That is why I have decided not to seek re-election to Congress in 2014.”

Mr. Rogers, in his seventh term, will join 19 Democrats and 21 other Republicans leaving the House before the 114th Congress next year. Members of the Intelligence Committee said they were taken completely by surprise. On Monday, Mr. Rogers led a lengthy meeting with members on the National Security Agency overhaul that he and Representative C. A. Dutch Ruppersberger of Maryland, the panel’s ranking Democrat, unveiled this week. He gave no indication that he would be leaving.

He did, however, inform the House ethics committee in January that he had begun negotiating with Cumulus Media that month, according to documents released Friday by his office. He also gave advance notice to Speaker John A. Boehner.

“Maybe that’s what happens when you hang around with N.S.A. and C.I.A. and all these covert people,” said Representative Luis V. Gutiérrez of Illinois, a Democrat on the Intelligence Committee who had no inkling of the retirement. “You learn to keep secrets.”

Senior Republican aides said that from his new perch on talk radio Mr. Rogers had the rare chance to earn considerable amounts of money and maintain the high profile he had sought and achieved on national security matters.

After a career in the public sector, as an F.B.I. agent, a Michigan state senator and a House member, he wanted something more lucrative, aides said. In a statement released Friday, Cumulus hailed him “as a media-savvy politician who last year appeared on more Sunday public affairs shows than any other elected official in the nation.”

The retirement announcement came as Mr. Rogers and his committee are dealing with a crush of work in a difficult election year. Beyond overhauling the National Security Agency’s electronic surveillance programs, Mr. Rogers is promoting a broad reauthorization of intelligence law and trying to cajole the Senate into acting on his controversial cybersecurity bill.

Representative Peter T. King, Republican of New York and a potential successor to Mr. Rogers on the committee, said the retirement would push Mr. Rogers to press even harder beforehand to enact those laws to burnish his legacy. It also could make House Republican leaders more open to giving him the floor time he will need.

This week, President Obama said he would seek legislation that would replace the N.S.A.’s once-secret program that collects bulk records about Americans’ phone calls. The program’s existence came to light after leaks by Edward J. Snowden, a former agency contractor.

Under the administration proposal, bulk phone records would remain with the phone companies. Under the plan, the government could obtain specific calling records of people up to two calling links from the phone number of a person suspected of associating with terrorists; except in emergencies, a judge would first have to sign off.

Mr. Rogers’s proposal is similar, except that he prefers allowing the agency to subpoena specific phone records without prior judicial permission. He has argued that it would take too long to get a judge’s order.

Mr. Rogers has become something of a fixture in the public’s mind on intelligence matters. He has been a constant presence on news television and a strong advocate for the government’s intelligence apparatus at a time when Mr. Snowden’s leaks have undercut support and a rising libertarian wing of his party has divided Republicans on issues like cellphone surveillance and Internet monitoring.

“He’s definitely the most out-front intelligence chair, certainly since I was in Congress,” Mr. King said. “He basically rose to the occasion. He did what he had to do.”

Committee Democrats praised Mr. Rogers as cooperative and bipartisan.

“This is not a good time to lose any member — much less a Republican — who has been a voice for moderation and consensus building,” Mr. Gutiérrez said.

Mr. Rogers has also courted controversy, especially among civil libertarians and advocates of an unfettered Internet.

He has been fiercely critical of Mr. Snowden, who has been indicted over the leaking of large numbers of classified N.S.A. documents and is living under asylum in Russia. Mr. Rogers, without offering evidence, has said that Mr. Snowden might be working with Russia’s intelligence service.

The unexpected announcement comes just three weeks before the filing deadline to run for his seat in the Republican primary. It set off a surge of interest among politicians in the area who had assumed that Mr. Rogers would keep the seat for years.

Though Mitt Romney carried his district in 2012 by only three percentage points, with Democrats already facing political headwinds, Republicans remain strong favorites to keep it.

One potential candidate already receiving attention among Michigan Republicans is Mr. Rogers’s brother, State Representative Bill Rogers. He lives in Mr. Rogers’s congressional district and is term-limited in the Legislature.

If he does step forward, he may enjoy an immediate advantage, benefiting from his brother’s name recognition and, possibly, his political network and campaign war chest.

Mike Rogers’s re-election campaign had more than $1.8 million in cash on hand at the end of 2013, according to its most recent filing with the Federal Election Commission. He will now be able to steer that money to another candidate.

Saul Anuzis, who served as chairman of the Michigan Republican Party from 2005 to 2009, said that by waiting so long to disclose his retirement, Mr. Rogers had made it a “tough thing” for another candidate to put together a viable campaign from scratch.

“I think a whole lot of people are looking at it,” Mr. Anuzis said. “His brother has the advantage of name identification and a built-in network.”

David S. Joachim contributed reporting.