From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily.

Today, the confirmation hearing of Gina Haspel as President Trump's CIA director focused on an unusual line of questioning.

What is your moral character?

It's Thursday, May 10th.

Matt Rosenberg, what is the situation that Gina Haspel is walking into on Wednesday morning on Capitol Hill?

So Gina Haspel is not a name that is known to most Americans because she spent 33 years as a clandestine officer in the CIA,

almost her entire life was classified until very recently.

She played a significant role in what was known as the rendition, detention, and interrogation program under the Bush administration, the torture program,

the program under which suspects were water-borted, they were kept in secret prisons at black sites.

So in 2002, she briefly oversaw one of these black sites in Thailand and a,

a Cate suspect was water-borted three times while she was there. A few years later, she was a senior official back at CIA headquarters in Langley,

and an order to destroy videos documenting brutal interrogations and torture at that black site in Thailand was conveyed under her name.

Now, the order was made by her boss at the time, but there's always been a lot of questions.

What was her role in this? Was she pushing for the destruction? The White House didn't want to destroy. There were a lot of other parts of the government thing do not destroy this.

So those are the big things that the Democrats especially are looking to pressure on.

And I think for most Americans, this is an issue that's in the past, but her nomination has kind of brought it back out into the forefront.

And going to Wednesday's hearing, we were going to get another airing of the unanswered questions about this program and this chapter in both the CIA's history and American history, where we basically tortured suspected Al-Qaeda members.

A kind of moral reckoning. Yes.

I'd call this hearing to order.

So what actually happens when this hearing starts?

I'd like to welcome our witness acting director of Central Intelligence Agency, Ms. Gina Haspel.

So Senator Richard Burr, the North Carolina Republican who is the chairman, he opens it with, I mean what can only be described is a very adoring statement.

...