DOJ Backs Off CIA/Senate Snooping Slap Fight

The Justice Department will not
be getting involved in the feud between the CIA and the Senate
Intelligence Committee over accusations that the CIA illegally
snooped on Senate staffers preparing a report on torture and
counter-accusations that the staffers illegally got their hands on
unreleased classified CIA documents during the process. The feud
was so bad that it actually caused security state worshipper Sen.
Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) to publicly declare that government
surveillance is a terrible thing and the Fourth Amendment
matters—when applied to the Senate, of course. From
McClatchy’s Washington bureau:

“The department carefully reviewed the matters referred to us
and did not find sufficient evidence to warrant a criminal
investigation,” said Justice Department spokesman Peter Carr.

The news marks an apparent end to an extraordinary feud that
spilled into the public forum in early March over the committee’s
report on the agency’s post-9/11 enhanced interrogation program.
The dispute included competing Justice Department referrals, with
both the CIA and the Senate Intelligence Committee accusing the
other side of criminal conduct throughout the course of the
interrogation study.

I explained the
details of the fight back in March. This Senate report
analyzing CIA interrogation methods during the Iraq war is known to
be very critical of the methods used by the CIA during the Bush
administration. Senate staffers were given access to CIA documents
through a special computer network at the CIA’s offices. CIA
employees, other than IT workers, were not supposed to have access
to the machines. During the preparation of the report, staffers
discovered documents disappearing out of the system, deleted by the
CIA. Later they discovered an internal CIA report (called the
Panetta Review) analyzing their interrogation methods. Feinstein
said the report validated her committee’s concerns about
interrogation methods.

Later the report disappeared from the computer system. The CIA
claims that Senate staff illegally gained access to the report
somehow, and it should not have been accessible to them. Feinstein
responded that it was the CIA that provided access to this report
in the first place and that it was a violation of the Fourth
Amendment for CIA to search Senate staff computers without a
warrant. The CIA, in turn, went to the Justice Department, accusing
Senate staffers of illegally removing classified information. But
the Justice Department apparently wants nothing to do with it.

The Senate’s
report on torture still has not been released. The Senate
Intelligence Committee has voted to declassify parts of it, but the
CIA gets to review it first to determine whether any of the
information would threaten national security if made public.