Feinstein: CIA hand in deleted report files

WASHINGTON - The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday accused the CIA of improperly removing documents from computers that committee staff members had been using to complete a report on the agency’s detention program,saying the move was part of an effort to intimidate the committee.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said on the Senate floor that the agency had violated federal law and undermined Congress’ constitutional right to oversee the actions of the executive branch.

“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,” she said. “It may have undermined the constitutional framework essential to effective congressional oversight of intelligence activities.”

CIA Director John Brennan rejected Feinstein’s accusations, insisting that the agency was not trying to thwart the committee’s work and denying that it had been spying on the panel or the Senate.

“We wouldn’t do that,” Brennan said in response to questions from NBC’s Andrea Mitchell in an appearance at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington.

“We weren’t trying to block anything,” Brennan said. “The matter is being dealt with in an appropriate way.”

He referred to inquiries now underway by the CIA’s inspector general and the Justice Department, and urged Senate critics to wait for the results of those reviews.

In her speech, Feinstein for the first time revealed that in 2010 the CIA had removed documents from the computer system used by her staff at an agency facility in northern Virginia, where the intelligence committee was working on its investigation.

Feinstein leveled the new charge as part of a lengthy public recounting of the years of jousting between her committee and the CIA over the legacy of the detention program, which President Barack Obama officially ended in January 2009.

The disclosure comes a week after the first reports that the CIA late last year had carried out a search of computers used by her staff.The CIA said it carried out the search to uncover how the committee gained access to an internal review of the detention program cited by Democratic lawmakers critical of the program.

Calling the present conflict a “defining moment” for the oversight of U.S. spy agencies, Feinstein denied that committee staff members had obtained the internal review improperly. She said the internal document had been made available as part of the millions of pages of documents that the agency had given the committee to conduct its investigation.

The CIA has referred the matter to the Justice Department to investigate possible wrongdoing.

“I am not taking it lightly,” Feinstein said of the investigations. “I view the acting counsel general’s referral as a potential effort to intimidate this staff.”

Brennan challenged the committee to issue its report - parts of which he said he disagreed with - but he also said, “I will protect sources and methods.”

Feinstein said she also wanted to use the speech Tuesday to address charges in the media that her staff had inappropriately removed a copy of the internal CIA review from the northern Virginia facility and taken it to the committee’s offices on Capitol Hill.

She confirmed that copies of parts of the review - which in recent weeks has been referred to as the “Panetta review” because it was ordered by former CIA Director Leon Panetta - are now inside a safe at the Hart Senate Office Building.

She said it was necessary to keep a copy of the review, which “corroborates critical information” of the committee’s own investigation, because of the CIA’s history of destroying records about the detention program.

Specifically, she mentioned the November 2005 decision by CIA officials to destroy videos depicting interrogation methods being used on two al-Qaida detainees.

“There was a need to preserve and protect the internal Panetta review,” she said Tuesday.

Feinstein was particularly animated when discussing the criminal referral made by the CIA’s acting general counsel to the Justice Department, a move she said seemed intended as an intimidation tactic.

She said the acting general counsel was previously a lawyer in the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, the section of the spy agency that was running the detention and interrogation program.

She said the man’s name is mentioned more than 1,600 times in the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report.

Feinstein did not name the agency’s lawyer, but she appeared to be referring to Robert Eatinger, the senior deputy general counsel. Last fall, the previous Senate-confirmed general counsel, Stephen Preston, left to become general counsel of the Defense Department, and the Senate has not yet voted on Obama’s nominee to replace him on a permanent basis.

In 2010, The New York Times reported that when a CIA official destroyed videotapes of interrogations in 2005, he told his superiors that two lawyers inside the CIA’s clandestine service - one of them Eatinger - had signed off on doing so.

Separately, the CIA’s inspector general opened a parallel investigation into whether CIA officers improperly monitored the work of the intelligence committee, a case that also has been referred to the Justice Department.

DOCUMENTS REMOVED

The dispute began in 2009, when the CIA provided computers to congressional staff members in a secure room at a CIA facility in northern Virginia so the panel could review millions of pages of top-secret documents in the course of its investigation of the agency’s detention and interrogation practices.

After first turning in 6.2 million pages without any index or search function - what Feinstein called “a true document dump” - the CIA provided an electronic search tool, and congressional staff members could make copies on their computers. The committee discovered that about 870 documents or pages of documents that they had been able to access had been removed in February 2010, and roughly another 50 were removed in mid-May 2010.

The removal of the documents “was the exact sort of CIA interference in our investigation that we sought to avoid at the outset,” Feinstein said.

The CIA first denied the deletions, then blamed CIA information-technology contractors for doing so without authority, she said.

A CIA official apologized for the removal of the documents on May 17, 2010.

Separately, committee staff members had found draft versions of documents that Feinstein referred to as the “internal Panetta review.” Feinstein said those documents were written by CIA personnel to summarize and analyze the materials that had been provided to the committee. She said the internal documents were unique for their “analysis and acknowledgment of significant CIA wrongdoing.”

Those documents disappeared as well.

Jeremy Bash, former chief of staff for Panetta, said the director had asked CIA employees to draw up “concise summaries” of the documents made available to the Senate panel.

Bash said neither Panetta nor any of his senior staff - including Bash - saw those summaries. To Bash’s knowledge, the summaries “did not say or analyze what was being provided to the committee or ask the [CIA employees] to come to conclusions,” he said. “Whether some people went beyond that … I don’t know.”

Then, on Jan. 15 of this year, Brennan informed Feinstein and the Intelligence Committee’s top Republican, Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, that the CIA had searched the computer network. Feinstein said that search also encompassed the committee’s network drive with its own internal work product and communications.

Two follow-up letters seeking answers to why the search occurred have gone unanswered, Feinstein said.

She received a standing ovation from her Democratic colleagues over her handling of the CIA situation at a private lunch Tuesday.

Several Republicans, including Arizona Sen. John McCain, also expressed their concerns.

Chambliss wasn’t one of them.

He indicated he disagreed with Feinstein in the dispute, without providing specifics. He called for a study “on what happened so people can find out what the facts are.”

“We’re going to continue to deal with this internally,” he said.

Sen. Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican who is a member of the Intelligence Committee, also questioned Feinstein’s account.

“That story has two sides,” Rubio said Tuesday.

“You may end up finding out that both sides are to blame, that both sides committed mistakes,” he said.

Other senators said the dispute had a chilling effect on congressional oversight.

“Heads should roll, people should go to jail if it’s true,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C. “If it is, the legislative branch should declare war on the CIA.”

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., an outspoken critic of the National Security Agency, shared Feinstein’s concerns that laws were violated in an “unprecedented invasion by the CIA into computers used by Senate” investigators, and said misleading statements from intelligence leaders undermine their credibility.

All U.S. spy agencies have drawn intense scrutiny since revelations last summer about surveillance of Americans by the National Security Agency. The Obama administration has struggled to rebuild public trust since former agency analyst Edward Snowden made the disclosures.

After the NSA disclosures, Feinstein was one of the intelligence community’s most ardent advocates, arguing that the widespread surveillance of people’s electronic and telephone communications was a necessary counterterrorism tool.

Information for this article was contributed by Mark Mazzetti, Eric Schmitt, Charlie Savage and Michael Shear of The New York Times; by Ali Watkins, Jonathan S. Landay and Marisa Taylor of McClatchy Newspapers; by Donna Cassata, Bradley Klapper, Stephen Braun and Kimberly Dozier of The Associated Press; and by Terry Atlas and Kathleen Hunter of Bloomberg News.