• A pitched battle has broken into public view between the CIA and its main oversight committee, the Senate select committee on intelligence.  • Committee chairwoman Dianne Feinstein took the Senate floor this morning to accuse the CIA of possibly violating the constitution by interfering with her committee’s investigation into the mothballed CIA torture program. Feinstein listed other possible CIA violations, of “the Fourth Amendment, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, as well as Executive Order 12333, which prohibits the CIA from conducting domestic searches or surveillance.”  • Feinstein said she did not want to take the floor but that she felt the Senate had taken cooperation with the CIA as far as it could go. She said the CIA was unresponsive to her questions.  • Watch video of Feinstein’s speech or read the full text.  • The conflict began when Senate staffers investigating the torture program were given – it is unclear just how – drafts of a sharply critical internal CIA report on the program, Feinstein said. Then the CIA tried to revoke access to the report.  • Feinstein accused CIA agents of improperly searching Senate staff computers. She also accused the CIA of intimidating Senate staffers when the acting CIA general counsel filed a crime report concerning the access of Senate staff to the internal CIA report, known as the Panetta review. Feinstein noted that the same counsel was chief counsel to the CIA torture unit from 2004-2009, and she said the same counsel was named 1,600 times in her committee’s secret report on the torture program.  • Feinstein said she would redouble the efforts to have the findings of her committee declassified and that the White House had agreed in principle to declassification.  • CIA director John Brennan responded in part to the accusations, denying that CIA agents had inappropriately accessed Senate staff computers. “Nothing could be further from the truth,” Brennan said. Brennan said the Senate was holding up declassification of its torture report, not the CIA. “It’s their prerogative,” he said. “I’m not going to stand in the way.”
Feinstein has ‘grave concerns’ that agency effort to block torture report may have violated constitution. Get the latest here