CQ Politics | Balance of Power - A Stumble on the Road to More Open Intelligence Briefings

CQ Politics | Balance of Power - A Stumble on the Road to More Open Intelligence Briefings

For a president who promised to create “a new era of openness,” Barack Obama sure is putting up a fight against a House proposal to open up intelligence briefings to lawmakers. But his veto threat against the bill is also a sign that maybe — just maybe — the chairman of the House intelligence committee could have spent a little more time talking through the proposal with the Obama administration.



The House intelligence bill essentially would get rid of the “Gang of Eight” process, which restricts briefings on covert operations to just the top four congressional leaders and the top for Intelligence committee members from both parties. Instead, as House Intelligence Chairman Silvestre Reyes of Texas explained last month, the administration would have to brief the full intelligence committees, unless the committee members themselves decide it’s okay for certain information to be shared only with the Gang of Eight.

The idea of briefing Congress more widely isn’t particularly controversial, either among Hill Democrats or among top Obama administration officials. So it’s a bit surprising that the Obama administration would threaten to veto the entire intelligence bill over that provision — until you realize just how much control over the briefings would be shifted from the executive branch to Congress.

“There is a long tradition spanning decades of comity between the branches regarding intelligence matters,” the administration said in its veto threat yesterday, and the Gang of Eight provision “would run afoul of tradition by restricting an important established means by which the President protects the most sensitive intelligence activities that are carried out in the Nation’s vital national security interests.” In addition, the administration warned that the language raises “significant executive privilege concerns by purporting to require the disclosure of internal Executive branch legal advice and deliberations.”

The Gang of Eight briefing process has a long history, dating back to the National Security Act of 1947, and was finally written into law in response to the Reagan administration’s funding of the Nicaraguan contra rebels through arms sales to Iran. It’s supposed to be a compromise between lawmakers’ right to know about sensitive activities and the executive branch’s need to keep them secret.

But Democratic leaders have been talking about revising the Gang of Eight procedures for quite a while, because the Bush administration often disclosed the most controversial antiterrorism operations — especially the National Security Agency’s warrantless surveillance program — only to that group. And the group is restricted in so many ways, such as not being able to take notes or discuss what they’ve heard with anyone who wasn’t at the briefing, that the members have to come up with elaborate schemes to dissent without giving away the secrets.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California said in February that the tightly restricted process “just isn’t right … because it gives all the cards to the administration and then if you say anything about it, you have violated our national security.” Even Central Intelligence Agency director Leon E. Panetta said in his February confirmation hearing that “the ‘Gang of 8’ process was overused by the previous White House and, therefore, abused.”

So it’s not as if Reyes is up against an administration with no desire to brief lawmakers more widely. He’s not under any obligation to get advance clearance for his proposal, of course, since the whole point of rewriting the briefing rules is to re-establish Congress’ role as an independent branch of government. But given how much talk went on between both sides of Pennsylvania Avenue about the proper balance of power when the “Gang of Eight” process was written into law, you’d think there would be a lot of give and take before that balance is rewritten, too.

A Democratic leadership aide says Reyes “will be talking to the administration to work it out,” so we may still see a more open intelligence briefings process when this is all over. But when you have both sides allegedly aiming for the same goals, it probably would have been just as easy to work it out before the veto threat.