Intelligence committee urged to explain if they withheld crucial NSA document
The leadership of the House intelligence committee is under growing pressure to explain whether it withheld surveillance information from members of Congress before a key vote to renew the Patriot Act.
A Republican congressman and government ethics watchdogs are demanding that the powerful panel's chairman, Mike Rogers of Michigan, responds to charges that the panel's leadership failed to share a document prepared by the justice department and intelligence community.
The document was explicitly created to inform non-committee members about bulk collection of Americans' phone records ahead of the vote in 2011. Michigan Republican Justin Amash alleged that the committee kept it from non-committee members – the majority of the House.
For the second consecutive day, the House intelligence committee's spokeswoman, Susan Phelan, did not respond to the Guardian's queries about the accuracy of Amash's allegation. Phelan, however, told The Hill newspaper that the committee held pre-vote briefings for all House members ahead of the Patriot vote. She did not deny Amash's claim.
Amash countered that members who attend classified briefings conducted by the panel, formally known as the House permanent select committee on intelligence or HPSCI, often receive fragmentary information.
Rogers and Feinstein, the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, have never made any bones about their posture as advocates for US intelligence programs and have vigorously defended the NSA and its activities as being essential for the protection of America from the threat of terrorism.
Amash's complaint about what was done with this specific document is new, but we have been hearing all along that the congressional oversight function has been generally treated as the exclusive preserve of the intelligence committees. I am not sure what the refusal of the house committee to respond to the complaint really means, but it seems like something that is going to require an open discussion.