Senate Intelligence Committee to receive briefing on Trump, Biden classified documents
Sarah Westwood
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Senate Intelligence Committee members will receive a briefing at the end of the month on the classified documents found at the homes of former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden.
The briefing was scheduled after a lengthy back-and-forth between committee leaders from both parties and the Department of Justice, which sought to limit access to the documents in question due to the two active criminal investigations into the cases.
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Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Mark Warner (D-VA) stressed that members were not interested in the potential criminal aspects of the cases but in whether the documents recovered from the residences or offices of both Trump and Biden contained sensitive material that could put national security at risk.
“Our job here is intelligence oversight. The Justice Department has had the Trump documents about six months, the Biden documents about three months. Our job’s not to figure out if somebody mishandled those,” Warner said late last month. “But our job is to make sure there’s not an intelligence compromise.”
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), the committee’s top Republican, had criticized the Justice Department’s rationale for stopping intelligence officials from cooperating with lawmakers.
“I don’t know how congressional oversight on the documents, actually knowing what they are, in any way impedes an investigation. These are probably materials we already have access to, we just don’t know which ones they are,” Rubio said in January. “And it’s not about being nosy, you know? Here’s the bottom line. If, in fact, those documents were sensitive, the materials were sensitive, and they pose a counterintelligence or national security threat to the United States, then the intelligence agencies are tasked with the job of coming up with ways to mitigate that.”
“How can we judge whether their mitigation standards are appropriate if we don’t have material to compare it against, and we can’t even make an assessment of whether they’ve properly risk assessed it?” Rubio added.
Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines left Senate lawmakers frustrated when she exited a classified briefing last month without answering questions about the Trump and Biden classified documents, citing the appointment of a special counsel for each case.
After that briefing on Jan. 25, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) said lawmakers would not stop pressing until they got to see the classified papers at the heart of both investigations.
“Whether it’s blocking nominees or withholding budgetary funds, Congress will impose pain on the administration until they provide these documents,” Cotton said.
On Feb. 2, Rubio and Warner demanded “immediate compliance” from Attorney General Merrick Garland and Haines with their requests for access to the classified documents themselves and the damage assessment in each case.
A damage assessment is an analysis from intelligence officials of how severe the risk would be to national security if improperly handled classified material were to be exposed publicly or read by a foreign adversary.
A person familiar with the briefing said it remained unclear whether Haines herself or other intelligence officials would conduct the briefing, as well as whether all of the underlying documents and the damage assessments for both cases would be made available.
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FBI agents seized classified documents from a storage room in Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in August after Trump’s team had voluntarily handed over dozens of other papers marked as classified.
Biden’s case began after his lawyers alerted the National Archives to the discovery of classified documents in Biden’s private office in Washington, D.C., and then snowballed into a controversy after the president’s legal team continued to find sensitive material in various locations around Biden’s Wilmington, Delaware, home before the FBI searched it and found several more.