Carrie Sheffield, a conservative commentator, is the founder of Bold, a digital news network committed to bipartisan dialogue. The opinions expressed in this commentary are her own.

(CNN) Critics of President Donald Trump often say that he's failing to attract top talent to fill his leadership posts. The irony is that once the President seeks to fill vacancies with qualified nominees, those same critics then seek to undermine their approval.

A case in point is Gina Haspel, Trump's nominee to head the CIA. Haspel's progressive critics are treating her unfairly, using her as a scapegoat for policies around interrogation techniques that weren't under her control and were backed by the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), which operated above her pay grade.

Carrie Sheffield

Robert Turner, former counsel to President Reagan's Intelligence Oversight Board and co-founder of the Center for National Security Law at the University of Virginia, put it well in The Wall Street Journal: "Ms. Haspel is not an attorney, and she had every reason to rely in good faith on the legal memoranda produced by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel upholding the controversial techniques. As former ACLU Deputy Legal Adviser Jameel Jaffer recently noted , OLC opinions 'have the force of law within the executive branch.'"

Perhaps we can argue about whether the OLC operates without sufficient transparency -- Jaffer says "there's something disturbingly backwards, and even undemocratic, about a system that allows the government to conceal and withhold opinions that have the force of law unless and until someone requests them."

Progressives like to say that Trump has no respect for the rule of law, yet this argument around the OLC is a far different debate than one about whether Haspel should have undermined the rule of law and orders of her superiors. Would progressives have preferred that Haspel had gone rogue and disrespected the rule of law during her long CIA career? (Ironically, it's journalists such as those at ProPublica who have gone rogue in reporting erroneously about Haspel's career.)

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