A top Senate Republican threatened to block Biden administration nominations if the U.S. intelligence community continues to “stonewall” Congress on providing details on the classified documents found in the possession of former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden.
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, slammed the unwillingness of Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines to provide details on or give them access to the classified documents found in the Mar-a-Lago and Biden sagas. He then went a step further by promising to impose “pain” on the Biden administration until it complies with congressional oversight requests.
GOP CLASSIFIED DOCS INVESTIGATIONS SLOWED BY SPECIAL COUNSEL
“Until the administration stops stonewalling Congress, there will be pain as a consequence,” Cotton said. “There’s a simple solution to this. The administration should stop stonewalling the Congress and provide these documents to us.”
Cotton wasn’t the only Republican to take aim at the “stonewalling” after a meeting on Wednesday. Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS) told reporters in the hallway after the Haines briefing that “there is a sense of frustration that [the] Justice [Department] is preventing the committee from hearing what they need to hear.” Wicker also signaled senators were not getting information about the possible mishandling of classified records by Biden and Trump because of the special counsel investigations into the two men.
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said it was a “very unsatisfying hearing.” “The bottom line is this: They won’t tell us what they have until the special counsel allows them to tell us. That’s an unacceptable position,” Rubio said.
Criticism also came in from the Democratic side of the equation, with Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, saying it was “not a tenable position” being taken by Haines. “What I think the director heard is — she didn’t just hear it from Sen. Rubio and I. Literally every member of the committee, without exception, said this won’t stand,” Warner said.
“It is our responsibility to make sure that we, in our role as intelligence oversight, know if there’s been any intelligence compromise. Every member of the committee, regardless of Democrat or Republican, unanimous in that this position that we are left in, until somehow a special counsel designates that it’s OK for us to get briefed, is not going to stand. And all things will be on the table to make sure that doesn’t happen.”
It comes after Attorney General Merrick Garland selected former Trump appointee U.S. Attorney Robert Hur on Jan. 12 to serve as special counsel to investigate Biden’s possible mishandling of classified documents. Garland also named former Kosovo war crimes prosecutor Jack Smith to handle investigations centered on Trump, including Mar-a-Lago, late last year.
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The DOJ and Office of the Director of National Intelligence thus far haven’t weighed in publicly on the existence of any damage assessment on Biden’s classified documents saga despite both agencies repeatedly discussing the Mar-a-Lago risk review last year.
Biden’s personal attorneys said they first discovered classified documents in early November at the Penn Biden Center. Biden’s lawyers have since found more classified documents at Biden’s Wilmington home in December and January, and the DOJ found more when it conducted its own search Friday.
