Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines defended herself one day after bipartisan outcry from committee members about her stonewalling on details about the Trump and Biden classified documents sagas.
Members of the Senate committee slammed the unwillingness of Haines to provide details on or give them access to the classified documents found in the possession of former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden following an “unacceptable” briefing by the DNI on Wednesday. Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) went a step further by promising to impose “pain” on the Biden administration until the intelligence community complies with congressional oversight requests.
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During the Wednesday briefing, Haines pointed to the special counsel investigations on Trump and Biden as a reason why she wasn’t providing more details, but she sidestepped this controversy the next day.
The DNI said during her speech at the LBJ Presidential Library on Thursday that it “absolutely does concern me” there are views that the intelligence community has been politicized, but she pointed to the intelligence community’s relationship with the Senate and House Intelligence committees as a bright spot — not mentioning the uproar that happened the day prior.
“One thing that is true today that gives me great hope and something that I’m grateful for is, frankly, our Senate Select Intelligence Committee, our House Intelligence Committee, is quite functional,” Haines said Thursday. “We’ve had the chair and ranking come over and do workforce interviews with me. I talk to senators on both sides of the aisle on a regular basis, and same on the House. And we try to do briefings to them on a bipartisan basis, so we send everything to both sides. We try to do everything in a way that promotes confidence in the system and that allows for that.”
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Haines had given them a “very unsatisfying hearing” on Wednesday. “The bottom line is this: They won’t tell us what they have until the special counsel allows them to tell us. That’s an unacceptable position,” Rubio said.
“Until the administration stops stonewalling Congress, there will be pain as a consequence,” Cotton said. “There’s a simple solution to this. The administration should stop stonewalling the Congress and provide these documents to us.”
Criticism also came from the Democratic side, with Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), the chairman of the committee, saying it was “not a tenable position” being taken by Haines. “What I think the director heard is — she didn’t just hear it from Sen. Rubio and I. Literally every member of the committee, without exception, said this won’t stand,” Warner said.
Warner said, “Every member of the committee, regardless of Democrat or Republican, unanimous in that this position that we are left in, until somehow a special counsel designates that it’s OK for us to get briefed, is not going to stand.”
Attorney General Merrick Garland selected former Trump appointee U.S. Attorney Robert Hur on Jan. 12 to serve as special counsel to investigate Biden’s possible mishandling of classified documents. Garland also named former Kosovo war crimes prosecutor Jack Smith to handle investigations centered on Trump, including Mar-a-Lago, late last year.
Haines said Thursday she tries to emphasize that “what we’re doing is for the nation and not for politics.”
“And a piece of it, from my perspective, is … trying to expose as much as we can about what we do and what we don’t do and being as transparent about that as possible so that again, we can engender trust with the American people about how we do our business because I think there are a lot of misconceptions about the intelligence community that we’re constantly trying to pierce,” Haines said.
The DNI added: “The perception of the intelligence community as being politicized makes it harder for us to do our job, right? … If the public doesn’t trust us and believes that we are biased politically or otherwise frankly in a way that is illegitimate, then people won’t pay attention to the warnings that we have — it makes us less effective from a national security perspective.”
The DOJ and Office of the Director of National Intelligence thus far haven’t weighed in publicly on the existence of any damage assessment on Biden’s classified documents saga despite both agencies repeatedly discussing the Mar-a-Lago risk review last year.
The Haines speech on Thursday was sponsored by the Public Interest Declassification Board, which seeks to push the intelligence community to do more to declassify intelligence.
Haines admitted that overclassification was a problem during her Thursday speech.
“This is an urgent challenge to solve because first, overclassification undermines critical democratic objectives such as increasing transparency to promote an informed citizenry and greater accountability,” Haines said. “And second, overclassification undermines the basic trust that the public has in its government. And third, overclassification negatively impacts national security because it increases the challenges associated with sharing information that should not be classified or at least not classified at the level the information is classified at.”
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Haines pointed to investigations on overclassification and the fact that “there are virtually no incentives in our bureaucracy to declassify or to refrain from classifying a document, but there are plenty of incentives to classify.”
Biden’s personal attorneys said they first discovered classified documents in early November at the Penn Biden Center. Biden’s lawyers have since found more classified documents at Biden’s Wilmington home in December and January, and the DOJ found more when it conducted its own search last week.
