By: Andrew Peoples
“I am not taking this lightly.”
In a strongly worded speech on the Senate floor, Intelligence Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) recently revealed evidence of a bitter and ongoing feud between Congress and the CIA over documents related to the Bush administration’s counterterrorism program. Feinstein accused the CIA of hacking Congressional investigators’ computers, stealing documents, and attempting to intimidate Congress by requesting an FBI investigation into its investigative tactics. CIA director John Brennan responded mere hours later, defending his agency and claiming that those claiming there had been “a tremendous sort of spying and monitoring and hacking will be proved wrong.” Unconvinced by Brennan’s assurances, Senate Majority leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) backed Feinstein two days later, ordering a probe into what he called “indefensible” hacking by the CIA.
The conflict stems from a five-year-old investigation by the Senate intelligence committee into the CIA’s “rendition, detention, and interrogation” program. The program, most of which President Obama ended when he took office, involved interrogation techniques such as waterboarding and other forms of alleged torture. While the CIA has abandoned these techniques, some of the detention parts of the program, including Guantanamo Bay, still exist.
The CIA provided more than 6.2 million documents to Congressional investigators, setting up a secure computer network in Northern Virginia to keep the files confidential, yet agreeing to relinquish its access to the network after its completion. While Feinstein accused the CIA of being unhelpful in her committee’s investigation by simply dumping the documents without any sort of structure, her real concern was with documents that disappeared from the network after some of the investigators had already examined them. Feinstein claimed in her speech that the CIA first denied that the documents were missing, and then blamed the incident on a technical glitch, before finally claiming that the order to remove them came from the president. Among the missing files is an internal CIA report on the rendition, detention, and interrogation program, which is said to contain the program’s most damning information.
The CIA argues that investigators should never have had access to the report, which Feinstein called the “Panetta review files.” Brennan distributed an internal CIA memo raising questions about how the committee obtained the files in the first place, describing a meeting he had with Feinstein in which she claimed her investigators did not have access to the files. In a January letter to Feinstein, which he included attached to the internal memo, he pressed her to explain why she requested the files already in her possession. CIA officials later publicly claimed that she rejected Brennan’s offer to work with the agency to determine how her committee’s investigators acquired those documents. One official went so far as to accuse the congressional staff of hacking the CIA, claiming a “they did something to get those documents,” and insisting that a “firewall was breached.”
Feinstein did not reveal exactly how researchers found the documents, but did claim that they were “identified using the search tool provided by the CIA.” She elaborated, “We don’t know whether the documents were provided intentionally by the CIA, unintentionally by the CIA, or intentionally by a whistleblower,” but she did state that the committee’s staff had done nothing wrong. Harry Reid also strongly rebutted the CIA’s accusations, calling the idea that investigators without technical training could hack the CIA “patently absurd,” and accusing the agency of producing no evidence to support its officials’ claims.
The feud between the CIA and the Senate Intelligence Committee has produced competing criminal referrals in the Justice Department, one from the CIA demanding investigation of how investigators obtained the Panetta files, the other from Harry Reid demanding an explanation of the CIA’s removal of those files. The dueling requests put the FBI and attorney general in an awkward position, as opening an investigation in one case and not the other could have serious political repercussions. The CIA’s referral is a source of outrage for Senators Feinstein and Reid. Both accused the CIA of using it simply as a method to intimidate the investigators, as Feinstein argued, “There is no legitimate reason to allege to the Justice Department that Senate staff may have committed a crime.” Feinstein also noted in her speech that the referral came from Robert Eatinger, who formerly served as the top lawyer for the Bush-era counterterrorism program. She implied that personal interest might be influencing the CIA’s activities, as Eatinger is mentioned 1,600 times in the Intelligence Committee’s report in ways that may be less than flattering. The Justice Department has not yet responded to either referral.
Ultimately, the CIA stands to lose more from the conflict than the Senate Intelligence Committee does, simply because it may lose Feinstein as an ally. The senator has more control over the agency’s activities than any other member of Congress, and has recently been one of its greatest backers. She strongly supports the drone program and was one of the Congressional leaders most vocal in her condemnation of Edward Snowden. But in the aftermath of recent events, she has accused the CIA of violating Fourth Amendment protections and the separation-of-powers enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. For the first time in her 21 years in the Senate, she has accused the CIA of being out of control. Sometime down the road, the CIA may find that crossing this senator carried grave repercussions.
