On Wednesday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton testified forcefully that the blocking of crucial State Department nominees more than a year after President Obama was inaugurated was endangering the security of the United States.

We’re now more than a year into a new administration and whether you agree or disagree with a particular policy, a president deserves to have the people that he nominates serving him.

Following the revelation that Senator Shelby was holding up all nominees, almost 30 of the President’s appointments have now cleared the Senate. However, one key State Department nominee remains stuck due to an anonymous hold – Laura Kennedy the nominee for the Conference on Disarmament. This is a post that the President wants to elevate to an Ambassador-level position. The conference is the forum for negotiations on the Fissile Material Cut-Off Treaty, a vital treaty that would ban further production of nuclear weapons. As a result of this hold, the United States does not have a negotiator participating in this major international – a fact that greatly undercuts security of the United States and the President’s nuclear agenda.

So what mysterious Senator, is holding up this nominee, hamstringing US foreign policy, and undermining American security? Well none other than Arizona Senator Jon Kyl.

Josh Rogin of the Cable confirmed this today and asked Kyl about his obstruction. Demonstrating the heart of a lion, Kyl told Rogin “I’m not sure if I have a hold on her.” Kyl’s staff however rushed to clarify, telling Rogin that the White House hasn’t let them in on the ins-and-outs of all the START negotiations. Kyl’s aide told Rogin:

For some reason they’ve [the Administration] been reluctant to respond. Consequently, Senator Kyl is reluctant to consider their nominees.

While not surprising, Kyl’s aide’s statement is revealing. It essentially admits that the reason Kyl is just crassly obstructing Kennedy has nothing to do with Kennedy’s qualifications, but everything to do with Kyl being a nuclear extremist. An Administration official told Rogin, “Kennedy’s position has nothing to do with those items [START or CTBT] … He will have every chance to scrutinize START when it is submitted for ratification. His pleas for info now are a transparent effort to kill the negotiations.”

Kyl’s foreign policy radicalism is pretty well-known, just yesterday I noted that Kyl associates with a tin-foil hat right wing extremist who believes that Obama is pushing America’s “submission to Shariah.” Kyl after all wants more, not fewer nuclear weapons, and he wants to conduct new explosive nuclear tests in the backyards of citizens from Utah, Nevada, and perhaps even Arizona.

This is also not the first time Kyl has obstructed nominees relating to nuclear weapons. Kyl infamously blocked Undersecretary of State Ellen Tauscher and slowed lead START negotiator Rose Gottemoeller’s confirmation – both of whom are crucial figures in the negotiations with Russia. Then just a few months later – in an act of stone-cold hypocrisy – attacked the Administration for not getting a new START deal done by the December 5th deadline.

John Isaacs smartly notes that Kyl has not officially come out against a new START treaty and has softened some of his “red lines.” But a Senator does not have to explicitly state his opposition to the treaty to gum up the process and block the President’s nuclear agenda, as Kyl is so clearly demonstrating.

A long-awaited Justice Department Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) report released last week found that lawyers John Yoo and Jay Bybee “had committed professional misconduct in writing legal opinions that authorized torture.” The OPR report revealed that many of Yoo’s emails had vanished:

[W]e were told that most of Yoo’s records had been deleted and were not recoverable. [Former Deputy AAG] Philbin’s email records from July 2002 through August 5, 2002 — the time period in which the Bybee Memo was completed and the Classified Bybee Memo (discussed below) was created — had also been deleted and were reportedly not recoverable.

The watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) “called on Attorney General Eric Holder to investigate the destruction of emails” and reported that “he destruction of these emails represents a blatant violation of the Federal Records Act (FRA) and may break criminal laws.”

In a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing today, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) said the deleted records pose “very serious concerns about government transparency and whether the [OPR] had access to all of the information relevant to the inquiries.”

Leahy then asked whether the DOJ has initiated an investigation into the circumstances behind the destruction of the emails. Acting Deputy Attorney General Gary G. Grindler said the DOJ is in the process of trying to establish the facts for why the emails disappeared. Grindler also studiously avoided suggesting that any foul play was behind the disappearance of the emails, stating that there was “nothing nefarious” about the deletions. Leahy then drew a parallel between the Yoo emails and the emails that the Bush White House previously claimed had disappeared:

I recall when millions of emails mysteriously disappeared during the Bush administration, and I had [said] they don’t just disappear. They must be there. And I recall them sending their press secretary Ms. Perino out to say, ‘what is he some kind of IT expert? That’s foolish, they’ve been deleted. They’ve disappeared. We all know they’ve disappeared. Why would anyone suggest otherwise.’ And then we found 22 million emails. [...]

During the firing of the U.S. Attorneys…there were a number of emails by Mr. Karl Rove and others in the White House that were missing. Now, two months ago, we finally find those emails of course after the investigation was over and after the time when the U.S. Attorneys might have been reinstated. I hope we don’t have to wait that long this time.

Watch it:

Newsweek reports that the National Archives is pressing the Justice Department to investigate the “possible unauthorized destruction of e-mail and other records” within the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel.