Biden administration must stop stonewalling Intelligence Committee
Quin Hillyer
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In today’s politically polarized environment, a presidential administration that has united Republicans and Democratic against it is almost certainly doing something wrong.
As Sarah Westwood reports in these pages today, the top GOP and Democratic members of both the House and the Senate and the top members of both parties of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees all are exasperated with the Biden administration’s stonewalling over access to classified documents found in the homes of President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump.
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Particularly in the Senate, where Intelligence Committee Chairman Mark Warner (D-VA) has been outspoken about Congress’s right to information, the remarkable bipartisanship on this subject shows just how isolated Biden is.
“I am done with the lack of willingness of the administration to address this,” Warner said during a recent appearance on MSNBC. “Their position does not pass the smell test. We are going to put limitations on what the [intelligence community] does, and I am going to encourage my colleagues to do the same on the Justice Department.”
Also, reported Westwood about Warner, “he said in January that a bipartisan group of lawmakers agreed with the need to ‘impose pain’ on the Biden administration in order to force its hand.”
This is important. Congress is not on a “gotcha” mission to politically hurt either Biden or Trump. Instead, reported Westwood, “committee members have said they need to review the underlying documents not to determine whether Biden or Trump mishandled them but to gauge how effectively intelligence agencies have managed the potential fallout of the documents’ contents falling into the wrong hands.”
This is prototypical congressional oversight, an absolutely proper and essential exercise of power through which the people’s own elected representatives can try to ensure the people’s interests are safe and the nation’s defenses are secure. For the Biden administration to withhold the documents from the members of Congress with appropriate and special security clearances is highly suspicious. What is Biden hiding? And why?
If the intransigence continues, Congress really should get tough by every lawful means available.