The CIA is investigating whether its officers improperly monitored members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which oversees the intelligence agency, U.S. officials said Wednesday.
The CIA inspector general is taking a close look at the agency’s role in the committee’s investigation of allegations of CIA abuse in a Bush-era detention and interrogation program, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., told reporters.
The allegations include whether CIA officers improperly monitored Senate investigators and possibly accessed their computers, two officials familiar with the investigation said.
The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the investigation publicly.
The allegations come at a time when the Obama administration is trying to regain public trust after classified details about widespread surveillance of Americans were disclosed by a former National Security Agency systems analyst.
The most recent allegations do not involve the NSA spying on Americans. But they do raise questions about the fundamental oversight of U.S. spy agencies by Congress and whether there were efforts to thwart it.
The allegations were first reported by McClatchy Newspapers and The New York Times.
At issue is whether the CIA violated an agreement with the Senate Intelligence Committee about monitoring the committee’s use of CIA computers, according to McClatchy’s account. The CIA provided the computers to congressional staffers in a secure room at its headquarters so that the committee could review top-secret documents in the course of its investigation into the CIA’s use of torture during the Bush administration, it said.
The CIA declined to comment. The Justice Department would neither confirm nor deny that the CIA inspector general referred the allegations to the Justice Department for investigation.
The topic of the CIA’s compliance with a law used to prosecute computer break-ins was recently raised without any context during a January Senate Intelligence Committee hearing.
“Does the Federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act apply to the CIA? Seems to me that’s a yes or no question,” Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., asked CIA Director John Brennan.
Brennan did not have an immediate response. But in a Feb. 3 letter to Wyden, Brennan said the agency is indeed bound by that law.
Brennan also said that the law does not prohibit hacking in the course of a lawful investigation. It would be extraordinary, however, for the CIA to assert that it was itself conducting a lawful investigation of the Senate Intelligence Committee, since the Justice Department traditionally handles investigations of members of Congress.
Wyden is known for his informed questioning of senior members of the intelligence committee during public hearings. His questions in March of last year about whether the NSA collects data on millions of Americans offered hints that were later confirmed through disclosures made by former NSA systems analyst Edward Snowden.
Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said he was concerned that the CIA may have inappropriately accessed computers used by Senate investigators.
“These allegations have serious constitutional implications that go to the heart of the separation of powers,” Leahy said Wednesday.
Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee completed the 6,000-page interrogation report last year and are revising it with CIA comments, before asking the White House to declassify its 300-plus-page executive summary, and its conclusions.
When the report was first approved by Democrats on the committee in December 2012, Feinstein said her staffers reviewed 6 million pages of records from the CIA and other sources, and came to the conclusion that the detention and interrogation program yielded little or no significant intelligence.
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