The CIA has supplied Congress with a portion of classified documents that are part of the controversial undercover background of President Donald Trump’s choice for a director of the spy agency.
The documents are meant to help Gina Haspel be approved by Congress as Democrats push to declassify more information about Haspel’s involvement in its now-defunct detention and interrogation program.
“As Acting Director Haspel promised, CIA delivered a set of classified documents to the Senate today so that every Senator can review Acting Director Haspel’s actual and outstanding record,” a CIA spokesperson said in a statement. “These documents cover the entirety of her career, including her time in CIA’s Counter Terrorism Center in the years after 9/11. We encourage every Senator to take the time to read the entire set of documents.”
However, there is no certainty of how much detail the CIA has provided lawmakers in advance of her Wednesday hearing.
Meanwhile, another set of documents were delivered to the Senate Intelligence Committee’s secure spaces. Almost all of Haspel’s records are classified because 32 of her 33 years at the agency were spent undercover.
Democrats argue that as the current acting director, Haspel herself is the declassification authority over her own record that puts her in a controversial position. Additionally, continuing to keep her record under wraps violates an Obama-era executive order banning the use of classification to “conceal violations of law, inefficiency, or administrative error” or “prevent embarrassment to a person, organization, or agency.”
According to The Washington Post, on Friday she offered to withdraw her nomination if it would avoid a bruising fight for the agency over its use of the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques, which are considered torture. Democratic senators Dianne Feinstein, Ron Wyden, Kamala Harris and Martin Heinrich are demanding that the director of national intelligence, Dan Coats, intervene to declassify the information.
“Given that Ms. Haspel, as the current Acting Director of the CIA, is in the conflicted position of serving as the classification authority over potentially derogatory information related to her own nomination, we can think of no more appropriate situation for you to serve as the relevant authority,” the lawmakers wrote in a Friday letter.
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