The Senate Intelligence Committee voted Tuesday to approve President Barack Obama's pick to lead the spy agency, setting the nomination up for consideration by the full Senate.

The vote came after the White House agreed to provide the committee with access to the secret legal opinions written by the Justice Department that justify the use of lethal drone strikes against terror suspects, including American citizens.

Senate Republicans also are using Brennan's nomination to push for classified records about the attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Libya.

Brennan is currently serving as the top counterterrorism adviser in the White House.

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The intelligence committee is expected to confirm Brennan's directorship with a vote Tuesday afternoon. Sens. Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mark Udall of Colorado, as well as Kentucky's Rand Paul, had threatened to block his confirmation over White House resistance to releasing the drone memos.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., chairwoman of the intelligence committee, announced in a statement, "I am pleased the administration has made this information available. It is important for the committee to do its work and will pave the way for the confirmation of John Brennan to be CIA director."

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The committee is scheduled to vote Tuesday on Brennan, who is currently serving as President Barack Obama's top counterterrorism adviser in the White House.

Brennan's nomination to lead the spy agency has been held up by demands from Democrats and Republicans for more details about the classified Justice Department legal opinions that justify the use of unmanned spy planes to terrorist suspects overseas, including American citizens, and about the attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Libya.

Obama nominated Brennan to be CIA director in early January. If the intelligence committee, which is controlled by the Democrats, approves the nomination, it would then move to the full Senate for consideration.

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According to the Huffington Post's Ryan J. Reilly, the secrecy surrounding legal opinions is at a meta level. Not only can we not know the content of these legal opinions, we can't even know how many such opinions have been issued. Via HuffPo:

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According to the Times, the administration is maneuvering information releases so as to appease just enough senators to see counterterror czar John Brennan confirmed as CIA director:

Rather than agreeing to some Democratic senators’ demands for full access to the classified legal memos on the targeted killing program, Obama administration officials are negotiating with Republicans to provide more information on the lethal attack last year on the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, according to three Congressional staff members.

The strategy is intended to produce a bipartisan majority vote for Mr. Brennan in the Senate Intelligence Committee without giving its members seven additional legal opinions on targeted killing sought by senators.

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The precise details behind the vote delay are not clear, but according to Reuters, Democratic senators were willing to vote Thursday, while a number of Republicans were not. "Political issues and procedural rules made a Thursday vote problematic, said congressional sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity," Reuters noted. Via Reuters:

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“I professed my personal objections to and views to some agency colleagues about certain of those EIT's, such as waterboarding, nudity and others where I professed my personal objections to it," Brennan told the Senate Intelligence Committee. “But I did not try to stop it because it was something that was being done in a different part of the agency.”

However, according to comments made by a longtime colleague of Brennan's, former CIA lawyer John Rizzo, the counterterror czar's "personal objections" were not known to even those working closely with him at the time. As HuffPo noted Tuesday, during a panel discussion on the film "Zero Dark Thirty" at Cardozo Law School, Rizzo supported the selection of Brennan as CIA director, but challenged his claims of objecting to waterboarding:

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Indeed, watching the Brennan hearing, and then struggling through the troubling Justice Department “white paper” spelling out the legal justification for the drone killings of American citizens (which was recently acquired and released by NBC News), left me with quite a different feeling. In large part, this was the feeling that our government’s imperial creep continues uninterrupted, that most people simply don’t care (irrespective of their supposed political views) and that almost everyone involved in this charade, especially those of us in the media who are supposed to serve as the watchdogs, has agreed to ignore the most obvious and glaring questions.

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Later in the hearing, Brennan rejected claims that drone strikes were provoking a backlash of anti-American sentiment. He said citizens are instead grateful to be rescued from the grip of al-Qaida. But commentators have been swift to challenge Feinstein's claims based on contradicting open-source reports and studies. As both the Washington Post and the Guardian note, civilian death numbers are difficult to tabulate with certainty (indeed, the very question of how the administration categorizes "civilian" or "enemy combatant" is in itself contentious). Suffice to say that Feinstein's "single digits" comments stands at odds with others' findings.

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Updated, 5:25 p.m. EST: Wyden pushes Brennan on whether an American citizen should be given the opportunity to surrender himself before a targeted killing attempt is made. But Brennan says an American who joins al-Qaida is an enemy in war and has thus forfeited this right.

But Wyden points out that the issue here is with evidence and possible geographical limitations when it comes to adding U.S. citizens to kill lists.

(In an ostensibly lighthearted moment, Sen. Burr comments that in the lengthy hearing, the nominee has drunk four glasses of water and says "I'll be brief... I don't want to be accused of waterboarding you." Because waterboarding jokes, especially when the very serious issue of torture and CIA interrogation techniques are on the table, are the mark of good taste.)

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On the eve of the hearing, President Obama fulfilled Congressional demands to have the Justice Department release the classified legal reasoning for the killing of US citizens by drones to the Senate Intelligence Committee. The decision follows the leak of a white paper, believed to summarize the full 50-page document senators have now received, which this week drew sharp criticism from legal experts. A group of 11 senators led by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) wrote to the White House demanding to see the legal opinion and threatening to hold off on Brennan's appointment were it not released. According to the AP, Wyden "left open the possibility he might still try to block Brennan's nomination":

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Reuters broke the news last night, paraphrasing a source close to the Committee, which "will examine whether the spy agency gave the filmmakers 'inappropriate' access to secret material." "They will also probe whether CIA personnel are responsible for the portrayal of harsh interrogation practices and in particular the suggestion that they were effective," Reuters reported.

The investigation comes weeks after Feinstein, along with Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz. and Carl Levin, D-Mich., wrote a letter to Sony Pictures CEO Michael Lynton criticizing Kathryn Bigelow's film:

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The question arose ahead of a vote over reauthorization of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), a 1978 law permitting the government to spy on correspondence between Americans and foreign individuals. Wyden, leading the charge to challenge the reauthorization, argues that the "Senate cannot say that we passed the smell test with respect to vigorous oversight if we don't have some sense of how many Americans … are being swept up under the legislation."

A number of FISA provisions passed in recent years are set to expire at the end of this year, and as Politico reported, "[Wyden] has placed a hold on the bill as he seeks information from the federal authorities, who have told Wyden in the past that they can’t deliver that data [on how many Americans are caught up in the surveillance dragnet]. And Wyden said this week that he’ll maintain that hold unless the Senate allows a vote on his amendments to introduce new legal checks and transparency rules to the law."

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"I believe it to be one of the most significant oversight efforts in the history of the United States Senate," said chair of the intelligence committee Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.  She noted that the report is "a comprehensive review of the CIA’s detention program that includes details of each detainee in CIA custody, the conditions under which they were detained, how they were interrogated, the intelligence they actually provided and the accuracy — or inaccuracy — of CIA descriptions about the program to the White House, Department of Justice, Congress and others."

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The FBI reportedly learned of Petraeus' affair with his biographer, Paula Broadwell, in late summer, but only told top officials at the FBI and Department of Justice at the time. The White House and Congress only learned of the affair last week, shortly before Petraeus resigned as CIA Director.

The FBI learned of the affair in the course of an investigation into harassing emails sent by Broadwell to Jill Kelley, a Florida woman who served as an "unpaid social liaison to MacDill Air Force Base, site of the military’s Central Command and Special Operations Command," according to the AP.

Bloomberg reports:

California Senator Dianne Feinstein, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said she hasn’t been told the second woman had an affair with Petraeus. 'She was frightened and went to the FBI,' said Feinstein, a Democrat, appearing yesterday on 'Fox News Sunday.'

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