Leadership Quote by Curt Weldon

“Now we have a whole separate supplier of data…” is the language of a man trying to launder certainty through process. Curt Weldon isn’t arguing the merits of the information itself; he’s staging a performance of validation. The key phrase is “whole separate”: redundancy as moral armor. In political crisis-talk, independence is currency. Weldon spends it liberally to imply that what’s coming next isn’t rumor or bureaucratic gossip but something that has survived contact with an external check.

The context matters: Able Danger was the controversial Pentagon data-mining effort Weldon championed in the mid-2000s, tied to claims about identifying 9/11 hijackers before the attacks and being blocked by higher-ups. In that arena, “verifying that same information” is less a neutral update than a strategic escalation. He’s building a narrative structure familiar to Washington scandals: first there’s an allegation, then there’s “corroboration,” then there’s the insinuation of a cover-up that makes the lack of public proof feel like proof itself.

Subtext: trust me, not them. Weldon positions himself as the conduit between hidden competence (data suppliers, intelligence scraps) and a supposedly complacent or compromised establishment. The sentence is packed with institutional nouns - “supplier,” “data,” “verifying” - that sound technocratic enough to outrun skepticism. It’s a rhetorical move aimed at shifting the burden: if multiple streams “verify,” then anyone doubting Weldon is cast as doubting due diligence, even patriotism, rather than one politician’s contested account.