Intel oversight

Congressional Oversight of the Intelligence Community Is Broken

Some cover-ups are more equal than other cover-ups.

That’s the lesson that might be gleaned from a series of dizzying events putting the intelligence community and its congressional overseers at odds this week. It began with a Republican report on Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, which led to an outcry from critics over how partisan lawmakers were participating in a cover-up. It was followed by President Donald Trump’s nomination of Gina Haspel, who oversaw the torture of terrorism suspects under the Bush administration, to lead the CIA—and suddenly those critics were singing a different tune, seemingly content to allow a different cover-up to go unaddressed.

These two incidents, coming back to back, aren’t just evidence of hypocrisy. They are symptoms of the same, longstanding problem, which is that congressional oversight of the intelligence community is thoroughly broken.