GUEST BLOG / By Steve Benen, MSNBC writer, Rachel Maddow Blog.
Once
in a while, important news breaks late on a Friday night. Take this report from
the Wall Street Journal, for example, which reached the public at 11:03 pm
(ET).
House Intelligence Committee
Chairman Adam Schiff issued a subpoena to the nation’s top intelligence
official Friday night, seeking to force him to turn over a whistleblower
complaint that the intelligence community’s inspector general has allegedly
deemed a matter of “urgent concern.”
The identity of the whistleblower
and the nature of the complaint weren’t revealed. But in a news release Friday
night, Mr. Schiff (D., Calif.) said the inspector general had determined the
complaint to be credible and notified his House committee of the matter on
Monday.
Not surprisingly given the
circumstances, many of the relevant details aren’t yet available to the public,
but we have a rough sketch to go on. We know the Intelligence Community
Inspector General’s office is aware of a whistleblower complaint that it
determined to be credible and a matter of “urgent concern.” We know that House
Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) asked Acting Director of
National Intelligence Joseph Maguire to provide the committee with the
information.
And we know that Maguire declined
to cooperate with the congressional request.
I think it’s fair to say Schiff
wasn’t pleased with the response. The California Democrat subpoenaed the
materials, demanding the full and unredacted record, and directed the Office of
the Director of National Intelligence to provide information on possible
communications with other offices within the executive branch (cough, West
Wing, cough) about the controversy.
The House Intelligence Committee
chairman also reminded Maguire in writing, “As Acting Director of National
Intelligence, you have neither the legal authority nor the discretion to
overrule a determination by the IC IG. Moreover, you do not possess the
authority to withhold from the Committee a whistleblower disclosure from within
the Intelligence Community that is intended for Congress.”
Schiff added, “Your office,
moreover, has refused to affirm or deny that officials or lawyers at the White
House have been involved in your decision to withhold the complaint from the
Committee…. The Committee can only conclude, based on this remarkable
confluence of factors, that the serious misconduct at issue involves the
President of the United States and/or other senior White House or
Administration officials.”
The committee chairman also
appeared on CBS’s Face the Nation Sunday, and host Margaret Brennan asked if
he’d received a response. It led to an interesting exchange:
REPRESENTATIVE ADAM SCHIFF: We’ve
gotten a response and the director has said, essentially, that he is answering
to a higher authority and refusing to turn over the whistleblower complaint.
This is deeply troubling. No director–
MARGARET BRENNAN: Just ignoring
the subpoena?
REPRESENTATIVE ADAM SCHIFF: Well,
at this point, yes. Ignoring the subpoena, ignoring our request. No DNI– no
director of National Intelligence has ever refused to turn over a whistleblower
complaint. And here, Margaret, the significance is the inspector general found
this complaint to be urgent, found it to be credible, that is they did some
preliminary investigation, found the whistleblower to be credible, that
suggests corroboration. And that it involved serious or flagrant wrongdoing.
And according to the director of National Intelligence, the reason he is not
acting to provide it, even though the statute mandates that he do so, is
because he is being instructed not to. That this involved a higher authority,
someone above the DNI.
In case this isn’t painfully
obvious, the director of National Intelligence only reports to one person: the
one who sits in the Oval Office.
Again, we don’t yet have a clear
sense of the nature of the whistleblower complaint, so I won’t speculate. That
said, we know it comes from the intelligence community; there appears to be
reason to consider the complaint credible; and the Trump administration appears
to be hiding it from Congress as part of an unprecedented and legally dubious
move.
And if Donald Trump or his team
were involved in ordering the DNI to withhold the whistleblower complaint, it
raises the potential of a very serious scandal.
As the process moves forward,
Joseph Maguire and others are going to argue that the whistleblower complaint
from within the intelligence community includes sensitive and confidential
information, which must be handled with care. But that’s not an excuse for
secrecy: the House Intelligence Committee, as part of its oversight
responsibilities handles sensitive and confidential information all the time.
That’s not a justification for
secrecy; it’s a sad and unsustainable excuse.
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