Tales from the Trail

Jamie Dimon managed to turn a multibillion-dollar trading loss into a winning moment.

The CEO of JPMorgan came sailing into the Senate office building this morning with a smile, and gave a pitch-perfect performance in explaining how a small group of traders in its London office screwed up a hedging strategy so badly that they lost at least $2 billion.

Dimon was apologetic, but not groveling. He stood his ground, but was not combative. He gave the impression he was an open book, but managed to give precious few details about how much the trading loss has grown.

He came off as so in-control that senators asked HIM for advice about how Washington should police Wall Street.

Investors gave Dimon rave reviews, sending the shares up 1.5 percent while the overall bank stock index closed down for the day.

The national security musical chairs was made official today by President Barack Obama.

On stage was a daisy-chain of Washington insiders who have worn many hats over the years and criss-crossed different administrations. They all report to Commander-in-Chief Obama, who by comparison appeared a relative newcomer.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a former senator and first lady, was there to welcome back into the fold Ryan Crocker, who was chosen to be ambassador to Afghanistan.

The Central Intelligence Agency has one more secret to keep this week — who won the Top Chef challenge in next week’s episode.

The TV cooking competition at the end of  Wednesday’s episode, in which House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was a guest judge and declared herself a “foodie,” previewed the coming week when the competing chefs do their thing at the intelligence agency. A smiling CIA Director Leon Panetta was shown in the snippet tasting an entry at a white-tablecloth table.

Having been to the CIA on occasion while covering intelligence and remembering being required to leave my cellphone and BlackBerry in my car because they weren’t allowed inside, I wondered whether the chefs were able to take their famous cooking knives into the secure facility.

In the alphabet soup of government national security agencies, the letters CIA seem to be sinking.

The latest blow to the spy agency was the attorney general launching an investigation into interrogation abuses and President Barack Obama has decided that the interrogation of terrorism suspects will be taken out of the hands of the CIA and put into the control of a newly-created group that will be housed at the FBI and report to the White House.

Some intelligence experts say the CIA didn’t want to do the high-value detainee interrogations anyway.

A top level U.S.-Pakistani spy meeting in April.

A top Taliban official killed (90 percent certain) in August.

Coincidence?

CIA Director Leon Panetta and Lieutenant-General Ahmed Shujaa Pasha, head of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, held a hush-hush meeting in the Washington area  in April.

The New York Times said the accuracy of American drone strikes against the network of Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud improved soon afterward.

Pakistani and U.S. officials believe Mehsud was killed last week, with White House national security adviser Jim Jones putting the likelihood at 90 percent, on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

CIA Director Leon Panetta is no stranger to Washington political drama, and he showed on Friday that he wasn’t going to watch from the sidelines while Congress threw stones at his spy agency.

No names were used, but Panetta left no doubt he was responding to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s charge that the CIA misled Congress about interrogation tactics such as waterboarding that were used on terrorism suspects after the Sept. 11 attacks.

In a publicly released note to CIA employees headlined “Turning Down the Volume,”   Panetta said the political debate on interrogation “reached a new decibel level yesterday when the CIA was accused of misleading Congress.”

Who gets the billions?

The incoming Obama administration is preparing a major overhaul of the $700 billion financial bailout amid rising complaints in Congress that the payouts are not going to the right people.

The Washington Post reports that Treasury Secretary nominee Timothy Geithner and top Obama economic adviser Larry Summers have been looking at ways to broaden the bailout to include more help for homeowners facing foreclosure as well as to generate loans for municipalities, small businesses and consumers — and not just the financial giants that helped to create the mess.

Obama, meanwhile, is expected to formally announce his picks for top intelligence posts at a news conference around 10:45 a.m. EST. Obama’s choice to head the CIA, former chief of staff in the Clinton White House Leon Panetta, has drawn fire from some security insiders who complain that he lacks experience on intelligence matters.

Barack Obama can expect questions about his plans to stimulate the flagging economy, his controversial choice of Leon Panetta for CIA chief and the war in Gaza at a mid-morning news conference.

Later, the president-elect lunches with President George W. Bush and all three living former presidents: Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush and Jimmy Carter. A planned photo op in the White House Rose Garden before lunch seems likely to be a damp affair — cold rain expected for most of the day. Still, it’s better than weather elsewhere in the United States: reports of snow in the Northwest and ice in the Northeast led morning TV newscasts today.

On Capitol Hill, more wrangling over whether to seat Illinois’ Roland Burris, who was spectacularly turned away from the Senate floor on Tuesday. Already, a couple Democrats — Dianne Feinstein of California and reportedly Jim Clyburn of South Carolina — are breaking ranks and saying Burris should be allowed to take over Obama’s former seat. The fact that Burris was appointed by Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, who is charged with earlier trying to sell the Senate seat, is at the heart of the controversy.