Congressional oversight

Top Dem: CIA officials thought spying on Senate ‘was flat out wrong’

A key Senate Democrat believes that officials within the CIA disagreed with Director John Brennan’s approach during a heated battle between the spy agency and the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said in an interview for a new episode of HBO’s “Vice” that he believed lower-level staffers within the CIA disagreed with Brennan’s decision to search the Senate’s side of a walled-off computer network for classified documents.

“This will be the first time I’ve ever said this publicly: My sense is there were clearly people at the CIA who understood that what Mr. Brennan had done was flat out wrong,” said Wyden, a member of the Intelligence Committee and consistent critic of government spying efforts. “And they drafted anapology letter.

“And yet Mr. Brennan was just unwilling to publicly acknowledge wrongdoing.”

“We are the agency that is required by law to conduct vigorous oversight over the CIA,” Wyden claimed. “We can’t do vigorous oversight over the agency if the agency we're supposed to be overseeing is in fact secretly searching our files.”