The Democratic and Republican leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee are pushing for access to the documents marked classified that were found in the homes of President Biden and former President Donald Trump.
The request to the director of national intelligence to provide the documents to the panel marks a rare unified effort across the aisle.
Sens. Mark Warner (D-Va.) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) are the leading members of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
In a joint interview with CBS Face the Nation’s Margaret Brennan, Sens. Warner and Rubio stressed the importance of seeing the records for themselves to determine whether there has been a national security breach.
“Our job is not to figure out if somebody mishandled those. Our job is to make sure there’s not an intelligence compromise,” Warner said.
“And while the director of national intelligence had been willing to brief us earlier, now that you’ve got the special counsel, the notion that we’re going to be left in limbo and we can’t do our job — that just cannot stand.”
In what has become a widespread issue in recent months, classified documents have now been discovered at the homes of Biden, Trump, and former Vice President Mike Pence.
Warner warned after a briefing by Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines that “all things will be on the table” to ensure the committee can conduct its constitutional responsibility of oversight.
He added that “every member” of the committee was “unanimous” that the Justice Department’s position, to not allow the committee to see the documents found at Trump and Biden’s properties until the special counsels approve it, “is not going to stand, and all things will be on the table to make sure that doesn’t happen.”
“We simply want to know what was this information,” said Rubio. “What were these materials that they had? So that we can make an honest assessment when they provide us a risk assessment, of whether or not they’ve taken the proper mitigation if any was necessary.” He agreed with Warner that the DOJ’s current position is “untenable.”
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