This would be a scandal if we really gave a damn
by digby
And no, it's not stupid crapola about Fast and Furious or Benghazi!. It's not about some lowly clerks at the IRS not being able to decode the campaign finance laws without looking like they're involved in partisan politics. This is for real and it's important.
Dan Froomkin:
The outrageous whitewash issued yesterday by the CIA panel John Brennan hand-picked to lead the investigation into his agency’s spying on Senate staffers is being taken seriously by the elite Washington media, which is solemnly reporting that officials have been “cleared” of any “wrongdoing“.
But what the report really does is provide yet more evidence of Brennan’s extraordinary impunity.
The panel concluded that CIA officials acted reasonably by scouring Senate computer drives in early 2014 when faced with a “potential security breach”. (That “breach” had allowed Senate staffers investigating CIA torture to access, more than three years earlier, a handful of documents Brennan didn’t want them to see.)
But the CIA yesterday also released a redacted version of the full report of an earlier investigation by the CIA’s somewhat more independent inspector general’s office. And between the two reports, it is now more clear than ever that Brennan was the prime mover behind a hugely inappropriate assault on the constitutional separation of powers, and continues to get away with it.
Most notably, the official who ran the CIA facility where the Senate staffers had been allowed to set up shop wrote in a memo to the inspector general that Brennan, after speaking with White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough about the errant documents, called him and “emphasized that I was to use whatever means necessary to answer the question of how the documents arrived on the SSCI side of the system.”
SSCI – pronounced “sissy”— is how the CIA refers to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. And “whatever means necessary” quickly turned into a foray into the Senate’s private workspace.
The scandal isn't the whitewash, although that's a scandal too. This is the part that would normally cause a stir:
Central Intelligence Agency Director John Brennan consulted the White House before directing agency personnel to sift through a walled-off computer drive being used by the Senate Intelligence Committee to construct its investigation of the agency’s torture program, according to a recently released report by the CIA’s Office of the Inspector General.
The Inspector General’s report, which was completed in July but only released by the agency on Wednesday, reveals that Brennan spoke with White House chief of staff Denis McDonough before ordering CIA employees to “use whatever means necessary” to determine how certain sensitive internal documents had wound up in Senate investigators’ hands.
Brennan’s consultation with McDonough also came before the CIA revealed the search to then-Senate Intelligence Committee chair Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), whose staff was the target of the snooping.
The new information suggesting the White House was aware of -- and did not stop -- the CIA’s computer snooping is unlikely to improve the existing distrust between Senate committee members and the executive branch. Feinstein has said that the CIA's computer search likely violated the constitutional separation of powers, an allegation the White House has declined to directly address.
This suggests a much bigger role for the White House in the torture cover-up than we knew until now. They have been playing the part of "mediatorY, giving the impression that they were somehow standing between the CIA and the Senate, trying to give both parties what they needed to do their jobs. yes, they insisted on redactions and slow walked the report for many months, but it wasn't because they didn't want the report to come out, but just that they wanted to make sure that CIA employees were put in no danger.
It's not that everyone believed that, of course. It certainly appeared that the White House was protecting the CIA. But this is the first time I've seen evidence that they colluded with the CIA during the investigation and actively participated in helping them cover up their torture history. That is, in the immortal words of Joe Biden, a Big Fucking Deal.
If the report was about anything but torture, which Republicans love and want to protect even above their desire to hurt President Obama, I would think this would have the makings of a serious congressional investigation. Unfortunately, most members of both parties are either outright advocates of torture or see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil, so that won't happen.
I guess I'll just be the first, and probably among a very few, to ask: "what did the president know and when did he know it?"
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