WASHINGTON ― President Barack Obama plans to preserve the Senate’s controversial CIA torture report as an administrative record but will not declassify it, according to the White House.
In a letter sent to the top two lawmakers on the Senate Intelligence Committee last week and released on Monday, White House Counsel Neil Eggleston said the study will be protected as part of Obama’s presidential papers.
“I write to notify you that the full study will be preserved under the Presidential Records Act,” Eggleston said in the letter to Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Richard Burr (R-N.C.). “The determination that the study will be preserved under the PRA has no bearing on copies of the study currently stored at various agencies.”
The majority of the 6,700-page report remains classified, but its executive summary was released in 2014 by the committee. It concluded that the CIA’s interrogation program used techniques far more cruel than it had previously disclosed and misled the public about the program’s ability to produce intelligence.
Eggleston added that as presidential record, the report is restricted as a classified document for 12 years. “At this time we are not pursuing the declassification of the full study,” he said.
In recent weeks, a number of Democrats ― Feinstein included ― have pressed Obama to either declassify the report or make it a federal record subject to the Freedom of Information Act. Many were concerned the report would disappear once President-elect Donald Trump took office. Burr had requested that all copies of the document be returned to the committee when he first took over as chair of Senate Intel ― which some Democrats took as a sign that he would make sure the report never saw the light of day.
“There are those who would like to see this report destroyed, but in the two years since its release, none of the facts in the 450-page summary has been refuted,” Feinstein said in a statement on Monday. “It’s my very strong belief that one day this report should be declassified. The president has refused to do so at this time, but I’m pleased the report will go into his archives as part of his presidential records, will not be subject to destruction and will one day be available for declassification.”
White House press secretary Josh Earnest downplayed the significance of keeping most of the report classified. He said “a substantial” portion of it has already been made public, namely its executive summary.
“Ultimately, the intelligence community will have to review the material that’s included in that report to determine what can be released,” he said in his Monday briefing.
Pressed on why Obama wouldn’t speed up declassification of the report, particularly given that he has expressed concerns about Trump’s apparent openness to revisiting torture, Earnest didn’t budge.
“I think there’s ample information included in that report on this topic that has already been declassified,” he said. “We’ve had an opportunity to wage this debate in public on a number of occasions, and I know there’s at least one official nominated to a senior position in the upcoming administration who has expressed the same kinds of views that are included in that report about the effectiveness of torturing terror suspects.”
Earnest was referring to Trump’s pick for defense secretary, retired Gen. James Mattis, who told Trump last month that he never found waterboarding to be useful.
Jennifer Bendery contributed reporting.