WASHINGTON — Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the former chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, struck back at the CIA Tuesday, blasting the spies for failing to hold personnel accountable for sifting through an off-limits Senate computer drive used to compile a damning report on the agency’s post-9/11 torture program.
In a lengthy press release, Feinstein engaged in a piece-by-piece dissection of the conclusions of a CIA Accountability Review Board, which announced earlier this month that no agency personnel would be punished for the January 2014 computer trespasses. The review board’s report, Feinstein said, was riddled with errors.
“The report released by the CIA Accountability Board, which recommended no accountability for wrongdoing by CIA personnel, contains many mistakes and omissions,” Feinstein, who chaired the intelligence panel at the time of the CIA’s controversial search, said in the release. “The bottom line is that the CIA accessed a Senate Intelligence Committee computer network without authorization, in clear violation of a signed agreement between the committee and former Director Leon Panetta.”
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In an effort to determine how the document had wound up in Senate hands, five CIA employees — two lawyers and 3 IT personnel — conducted a dayslong review, along with the agency’s Office of Security, of the Senate committee’s walled-off network. The review included keyword searches of emails and incursions into Senate files, to see whether and how the document had been obtained. Portions of this search were explicitly directed by CIA Director John Brennan, who also consulted with the White House before finally letting Feinstein know the computer searches had taken place.
This is a developing story and will be updated.
