WASHINGTON ― President Barack Obama strenuously defended the CIA’s hardball approach in its battle with Senate investigators looking into the agency’s use of torture at a pivotal moment, according to a new report.
The vigor with which Obama defended the CIA prompted then-Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) to offer a startled rebuttal. “Mr President,” Reid said in early 2014, “I wish you could hear yourself.”
The anecdote is included in a new, deeply reported three-part series by The Guardian’s Spencer Ackerman, centered on one of the Senate staffers who led the investigation into the CIA, Daniel Jones.
Jones, a lead author of the Senate’s torture report, was referred by the CIA to the Department of Justice for possible criminal prosecution, with the CIA suggesting he effectively stole classified documents before secreting them to a secure facility in the Hart Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill.
The document in question is known as the Panetta Review and is a CIA investigation of itself that came to many of the same conclusions the Senate later did. The document became important because the CIA would go on to dispute the Senate findings. For the Senate, the document proved that the protestations were not genuine. (Here’s some background on the document.)
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat who led the panel’s investigation, went to the Senate floor in March 2014 to make the extraordinary charge that the CIA had spied on Senate staffers, setting off a constitutional mini-crisis.
The CIA believed Senate staff may have illegally absconded with documents and broken the agreement reached between the agency and the Senate. Meanwhile, the Senate was holding up the CIA’s office of general counsel nominee, using it as leverage to get the agency to hand over the Panetta Review. What the agency suspected, and what Jones confirmed to Ackerman, was that the Senate already had the document. It was in this context that Reid appealed to Obama to rein in the CIA, only to find him defending the agency’s behavior.
Ned Price, a spokesman for the National Security Council at the White House, declined to comment on what he called a private conversation between Obama and Reid. “But what the President has made abundantly clear is that some of the techniques described in the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report were inconsistent with our values as a nation, which is why one of his first acts in office was to sign an Executive Order that brought an end to the program and prohibited the use of harsh interrogation techniques,” Price said.
It wasn’t the last time Reid put his thumb on the scales. In November of that same year, White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough came to the Senate for a lunch briefing. Before he arrived, Reid wound up his troops, HuffPost reported at the time, telling them that he was sick of hearing them complain about White House behavior privately, and then act like nothing was wrong when White House officials visited. And so they let McDonough have it.
The report was finally released in December 2014, and confirmed the agency had engaged in grotesque acts of torture. The only person ever punished was, ironically, one of the Senate staffers, Alissa Starzak, who worked on the report. Republicans held up her nomination as payback for the probe.
Before You Go
