A House panel is weighing a separate investigation into whether the Obama administration pressured intelligence analysts to skew data to make the Islamic State and its allies seem weaker in their reports.
“Clearly, the allegations concern the committee,” House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., told the Washington Examiner. “We are going to gather facts and, if we have to, open an investigation.”
The inspector general’s probe into the alleged manipulation of intelligence was first reported Wednesday by The Daily Beast, which said more than 50 analysts at Central Command’s headquarters in Tampa, Fla., had formally complained that their reports had been altered by senior officials to make the Islamic State seem weaker than it was.
The Guardian, meanwhile, reported Thursday that Director of National Intelligence James Clapper was in nearly daily contact with Army Brig. Gen. Steven Grove, Central Command’s director of intelligence. A former official said such an arrangement is “highly, highly unusual,” further raising the question of whether the administration’s Islamic State policy was based on politicized analysis of intelligence data.
White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Friday that President Obama is confident in the information he gets from the intelligence community, and that officials would allow the investigation to run its course.
“As a general matter, the president does have confidence in the members of the intelligence community that take very seriously the responsibility that they have to make sure that the president and his team have access to the most and best information available so that they can make the best possible decisions about the national security of the United States,” Earnest said.
“The intelligence community is very well aware of the high standards that this president has set and his desire to understand exactly what’s happening, even if that means that the intelligence community may have to share with the president some bad news.”
The reports come at a bad time for the Obama administration.
The president’s policy against the extremist group has been harshly criticized as ineffective, especially by Republican lawmakers, and the allegations cloud the credibility of the administration’s arguments for staying the course in a fashion similar to controversies over intelligence about Iraq’s nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs during the George W. Bush administration.
A former House Intelligence Committee chairman described the allegations as “very, very serious.”
“Is this a pattern of what’s been going on in the intelligence community throughout this president’s administration? Is the intelligence community an independent voice giving the president real information, or has it become a tool to support presidential policy?” asked former Rep. Pete Hoekstra, R-Mich.
Hoekstra led the panel from 2004-07, at the peak of the congressional response to allegations that intelligence about Iraqi weapons programs had been politicized. He said such concerns always threaten the integrity of the information on which critical national policies are based.
“If we’ve been whitewashing the threat from ISIS, we’re seeing the results of that today,” he said, referring to the crisis created by hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees pouring into Europe, which has added to the criticism of Obama’s policy toward the civil war in that country.
A congressional aide said the Intelligence Committee would take a look at the inspector general’s findings and decide where to go from there. But Hoekstra said the issue is so serious that Congress must take a hard, independent look at the allegations to determine if there’s any truth to them.
“This investigation starts with the IG but it has to end with Congress,” he said.
