Feinstein Says CIA Illegally Spied on Senate’s Torture Investigation

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., broke her silence and turned on her heel on Tuesday by stunningly accusing the CIA of a constitutional breach for breaking into a secure database of interrogation records the agency provided to lawmakers who were investigating torture allegations under the Bush administration.

After working for weeks behind closed doors, Feinstein, chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, long considered one of the CIA’s staunchest supporters, walked onto the Senate floor on Tuesday morning to rebuke the agency and plead for support from her Senate colleagues in what she described as “a defining moment for the oversight of our intelligence community.”

Feinstein said that CIA Director John Brennan informed her last month that the agency had broken into and searched the offsite database that contains more than 6 million records, including private committee notes about the investigation that were supposed to be firewalled. According to the senator, Brennan said the CIA was looking for evidence of how the committee obtained an internal CIA review of the same records known as the “Internal Panetta Review” which is reported to be harsher accounting of the Bush era.

“Based on what Director Brennan has informed us, I have grave concerns that the CIA’s search may well have violated the separation of powers principles embodied in the United States Constitution, including the Speech and Debate clause,” Feinstein said. “It may have undermined the constitutional framework essential to effective congressional oversight of intelligence activities or any other government function."

Immediately following her speech, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., likened the gravity of the constitutional powers dispute before the Senate to the Church Committee of the 1970s that reigned in CIA powers.

Within minutes, Brennan denied Feinstein’s allegation that the CIA searched the network during an interview with NBC’s Andrea Mitchell at the Council on Foreign Relations. 

“There’s never been an effort by the CIA to thwart the SSCI’s investigation,” Brennan said. “We weren’t trying to block anything and the matter is being dealt with in the appropriate way… the facts will come out.”

When Mitchell pressed further, Brennan said, “Let me assure you that CIA, in no way, was spying on the SSCI or the Senate. We greatly respect the separation of power between the executive branch and the legislative branch and we’re going to do everything possible to work with the committee in the future.”

White House spokesman Jay Carney declined to comment citing an investigation by the Justice Department and the CIA’s inspector general -- which has spooked Senate staffers -- but said President Barack Obama retains “great confidence” in Brennan.

In a captivatingly detailed account on the Senate floor, Feinstein said that in January, “Brennan requested an emergency meeting to inform me and Vice Chairman (Saxby) Chambliss that without prior notification or approval, CIA personnel had conducted a ‘search’—that was John Brennan’s word—of the committee computers at the offsite facility.”

“I have been trying to resolve this dispute in a discreet and respectful way. I have not commented in response to media requests for additional information on this matter. However, the increasing amount of inaccurate information circulating now cannot be allowed to stand unanswered,” Feinstein said. “It was this computer network that, notwithstanding our agreement with [then-CIA] Director Panetta, was searched by the CIA this past January, and once before,” she said.

The Senate and CIA have butted heads since 2009 over the database. It was created when the committee demanded unfettered access to CIA records after staffers chasing torture allegations in an initial search found the agency’s records revealed troubling evidence. CIA officials insisted that their records not be delivered physically to the Senate committee’s office, rather be made available via electronic format at a neutral location on a secure network. Only CIA’s information technology supporters, who created the network, were to have access to it. The Senate committee reluctantly agreed to the arrangement, at Panetta’s suggestion.

On Tuesday, Feinstein described a cumbersome process whereby many people from the committee, CIA and private contractors have accessed millions of documents the agency “dumped” into the database, which initially had no search function. Over time, hundreds of documents reviewed by committee staff went missing from the database. The senator said the CIA first played dumb, then blamed contractors for unauthorized removals, and then blamed the White House.

“After a series of meetings, I learned that on two occasions, CIA personnel electronically removed committee access to CIA documents after providing them to the committee. This included roughly 870 documents or pages of documents that were removed in February 2010, and secondly roughly another 50 were removed in mid-May 2010.”

“This was the exact sort of CIA interference in our investigation that we sought to avoid at the outset,” she said.

The “Internal Panetta Review” allegedly paints a harsher picture of CIA’s interrogation practices than previously known. But Feinstein said the committee obtained the review simply by searching the database CIA provided and had no way to know if it was put there on purpose or not, or by a whistleblower. Either way, it did not matter to her -- she said the committee legally was entitled to review and keep the Panetta review, whether or not it was meant for Senate eyes.

“These were documents provided by the executive branch pursuant to an authorized congressional oversight investigation. So we believe we had every right to review and keep the documents.”

The committee is expected to release a damning report about the agency’s interrogation techniques at the height of the war on terror. Brennan encouraged the committee to submit its findings to CIA for a classification review – which White House officials support -- and put this dispute behind them, suggesting the agency has more important pressing security concerns commanding his attention.  

“We have to focus on the future,” he said. “I look forward to having this chapter of CIA’s past behind us.”