Senator Sheldon Whitehouse on Wednesday criticized the FBI for lack of transparency with Congress, saying it “is not permissible” to have a desk that does not answer lawmakers’ questions about his actions. His comments come a day after he blamed FBI Director Christopher Wray for not answering written questions from lawmakers during hearings involving FBI witnesses for the past four years.
“It’s just not acceptable to have a government agency, and certainly not a law enforcement agency, that won’t answer questions about its behavior for years,” Whitehouse, a Democrat, told “Red & Blue,” anchor Elaine Quijano. .
If the FBI doesn’t improve its process for answering legislative questions, Whitehouse said he would consider withholding credits and stopping nominees, as well as other tools of “ legislative persuasion. ”
Whitehouse told Wray about the FBI’s response during a Senate hearing on Tuesday Capitol attackIn response, Wray mentioned a “comprehensive interagent process for answering questions,” but said he would “do whatever I can to improve the process.” He said he is just as “frustrated” as lawmakers and agreed that “we need to get better.”
When asked if he is confident the FBI will change its practices, Whitehouse told Quijano, “No, they’ll have to prove it to me.”
“I have a proven track record [a] categorical blocking of information, ”he said. And I know because we just answered 800 questions on behalf of the nominee attorney general [Merrick] Garland, what they can do if they want. ‘
Wray testified Tuesday as part of the Senate investigation into the run-up to the Capitol attack. At the end of February, the former capitol police chief arrived accused the intelligence community in his testimony, in which he said his army was willing to handle the number of people they had been told to expect. The former House Sergeant-at-arms testified that daily intelligence reports between January 4 and January 6 “predict the likelihood of civil disobedience or arrest during the protests as low to unlikely.”
The former House and Senate sergeant-at-arms said they had not seen a report from an FBI field office in Norfolk, Virginia, warning law enforcement officials of an anonymous social media thread threatening war in the Capitol. The former Capitol police chief said the report reached police the day before the attack, but said he had not seen the raw data.
“The intelligence was not getting where it was needed,” said the acting capitol police chief, adding that the Jan. 5 report had been emailed, when instead it should have been communicated via “a phone call or something like that “.
Whitehouse said it is not yet clear how the intelligence gathering process could be improved to prevent similar incidents.
“I suspect there’s going to be a much broader solution than just a small specific silver bullet,” he said, adding, “It’s very difficult when you’re getting boatloads of information to a fusion center to go through, figure it out, analyze it. it and find out what it means and limit it so that the consumer of those services can actually use it to solve that problem. ”
“But especially when an FBI report from Norfolk says there is going to be a war and that information is not getting to the decision makers protecting the Capitol, something has gone wrong,” he added.
But the senator said he feels safe in the Capitol despite the communication troubles.
“Actually, I’d like to see the barbed wire come down as soon as possible,” he said. “Once the security professionals have come up with their plan – not a great sight for our great Republic to have its capital encased in barbed wire.”
Stefan Becket and Nicole Sganga contributed to the report.