WASHINGTON — Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee are gearing up to fight their new Republican chairman’s attempts to reclaim the panel’s report on the CIA’s torture program, setting the stage for a feud between the committee’s majority and minority members less than three weeks into the new Congress.
“You can’t just come in here and rewrite history,” said a U.S. official familiar with the situation, who requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of committee matters. “We’re not just going to roll over and let him do this.”
The official’s comments came after reports earlier this week that committee chairman Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) sent a letter to the executive branch earlier this month demanding that it return its copies of the classified 6,900-page torture report. In December, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), then the panel’s chairwoman, had sent the full report out to the White House for “dissemination to all relevant agencies,” just before she turned the committee reins over to Burr.
In his request, Burr suggested that Feinstein had violated Senate Intelligence Committee protocols by sending out the full report. Most committee Democrats, with the exception of Feinstein, only became aware of Burr’s Jan. 14 request after news reports of the letter emerged this week, the U.S. official said.
When news of Burr’s move finally surfaced, Democratic lawmakers made no secret of their outrage.
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“Senator Feinstein was smart to keep a copy of the Panetta Review,” he said. “I certainly don’t think the Senate should allow the Panetta Review to be covered up by letting [CIA] Director [John] Brennan stick it in the shredder.”
