According to Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, there are still questions on “almost everything” after the Gang of Eight briefing Tuesday concerning classified documents that were seized at the homes of both President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump, going on to state that the lack of information is hindering the right of Congress to conduct oversight of the intelligence community.
The conservative senator then stated that agencies within that community can expect to be put under some serious pressure in the coming days.
“Those agencies in the intelligence community have to come to Congress every year for their money and for the authorization to do things, and I think that’s going to get harder here in the short term for them until we find some resolution on this topic,” the Florida Republican and vice-chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, went on to say during an appearance on Newsmax’s Kilmeny Duchardt on Tuesday.
“For them to be able to do their job, they’ve got to allow us to do ours,” he continued. “Right now, they’re not.”
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The Gang of Eight, consisting of the top four leaders in Congress and the chairmen and vice chairmen of the Senate and House Intelligence committees, got the briefing after Rubio and Senate Intelligence Chairman Mark Warner, D-Va., pushed for months for more information about the documents that were seized.
“We have a fundamental challenge here and that is the special counsel and the Department of Justice are telling the intelligence community that they can’t share with Congress more information about what exactly they found, not just at Mar-a-Lago, but in Biden’s garage.”
That matters, said Rubio, because even though it’s not up to lawmakers to investigate the documents, they need to know if they are a threat to national security.
“If, for example, Joe Biden has highly classified material laying around his garage, what threat does that pose to the country and what are the agencies doing to protect our methods, to protect the people who gave it to us, and to protect partners that it may have come from?” the senator said during his interview with Duchardt. “How can we judge whether those agencies are doing a good job of protecting our intelligence or mitigating against the danger if we don’t know what intelligence they’re talking about?”
The intelligence community is telling Congress to trust them, Rubio added, but “our job is not to trust them. Our job is to work with them, to verify, and they’re not allowing us to do it.”
Rubio then said the outrage over the “unsustainable position” that has been taken goes across the aisle. He then noted there will be some “rough days between Congress and the intelligence community.”
The Florida senator also stated he doesn’t care what the special counsel investigation wants to happen.
“The special counsel’s job of doing an investigation would not be impeded by what we’re asking for, and the Justice Department does not get to veto the right of Congress to conduct oversight over the intelligence community,” he said to Duchardt.
“Our oversight is not over the criminal justice part of it, but it’s impossible to assess it because we have no idea what documents we are talking about, what material we are talking about, or how they handled one versus the other,” Rubio remarked. “There’s just no way to know it. So that’s part of the problem. The Justice Department and the Intelligence Committee are two separate things.”
