Five months after a request for information from Senate Intelligence Committee leaders, the U.S. Department of Justice said it’s “working” on it.
The response, sent by letter on Saturday, was in reply to an Aug. 14 request by Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) seeking to determine whether classified documents discovered in the home of former President Donald Trump posed any threat to national security.
The senators had since requested the same information concerning classified documents found in the former office of President Joe Biden at the Penn Biden Center.
In the letter, obtained by The Epoch Times, Assistant Attorney General Carlos Felipe Uriarte wrote, “We are working with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to support the provision of information that will satisfy the Committee’s responsibilities without harming the ongoing Special Counsel investigations.”
Uriarte sent the letter one day before Warner and Rubio appeared on CBS News’ “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan” and expressed displeasure about being “left in limbo” concerning information they deem essential to overseeing the nation’s intelligence operations. The interview had been recorded earlier in the week.
“Do you have any timeline in terms of when you will get visibility into the documents of classified material that both President Biden and President Trump had in their residences?” Brennan asked the senators.
“Unfortunately, no,” Warner replied.
“And this committee has had a long bipartisan history of doing its job. And our job here is intelligence oversight. The Justice Department has had the Trump documents about six months, the Biden documents about three months. Our job is not to figure out if somebody mishandled those, but our job is to make sure there’s not an intelligence compromise.”
Both senators were dismissive of the idea that they posed any threat to the ongoing criminal investigations.
“We have a right, as not only members of the Intelligence Committee, but as part of the leadership, to read virtually every classified document,” Warner said.
Warner and Rubio are members of the so-called Gang of Eight, select congressional leaders who are briefed on classified intelligence matters by the executive branch.
“These are probably materials we already have access to,” Rubio said. “We just don’t know which ones they are.”
Without that knowledge, he said, it’s impossible for the committee to assess whether the intelligence agencies are properly responding to any security threat the documents may pose.
Both senators are determined to obtain the requested information and are willing to apply greater pressure on the agencies involved.
“I’m not in the threat business right now,” Rubio said. “But … there are things we need to do as a committee every year to authorize the moving around of funds. I think the director of national intelligence and other heads of intelligence agencies are aware of that.”
“We’re going to figure out a way to make sure that we get that access so that we can not only tell the American people,” Warner said, “but we’ve got another 85 U.S. senators who are not on the Intelligence Committee who look to us to get those assurances.”
