Senator Sheldon Whitehouse on Wednesday criticized the FBI for its lack of transparency with Congress, saying it “is not tolerable” to have an agency that does not answer questions from lawmakers about its actions. His comments come a day after he assassinated FBI Director Christopher Wray for failing to answer written questions from lawmakers at FBI witness hearings over the past four years.
“It’s not tolerable to have a government agency, especially a law enforcement agency, that doesn’t answer questions for years about their conduct,” a Democrat, Elaine Quijano, anchor of “Red & Blue,” told Whitehouse . .
If the FBI does not improve its process of answering questions from the legislature, Whitehouse said it would consider withholding credits and stopping candidates, as well as other “legislative persuasion” tools.
Whitehouse spoke to Wray about the FBI’s response capacity during a hearing in the Senate on Tuesday on the Assault on the Capitol. In response, Wray cited an “elaborate inter-agency process for answering questions,” but said he “would do what I can to improve the process.” He said he is as “frustrated” as lawmakers are and agreed that “we need to improve.”
When asked if he thinks the FBI will change his practices, Whitehouse told Quijano, “No, they’ll have to prove it to me.”
“I have a proven track record of [a] categorical blocking of information, “he said.” And I know because we just received 800 questions on behalf of the designated attorney general [Merrick] Garland, what can they do if they want to? ”
Wray testified Tuesday as part of the Senate investigation into the pre-Capitol assault phase. In late February, the former Capitol police chief blamed the intelligence community in his testimony, saying his force was prepared to handle the number of people who had been told to wait. The former House sergeant-at-arms said daily intelligence reports between Jan. 4 and 6 “predicted that the possibility of civil disobedience or detention during protests would be remote to improbable.”
The former House and Senate gun sergeant said he had not seen any report from an FBI field office in Norfolk, Virginia, warning police officials about an anonymous thread from the social media threatening war on 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.
“Intelligence did not get where it needed to go,” said the acting Capitol police chief, who added that the January 5 report was sent by e-mail, when instead ‘should communicate via’ a phone call or something ‘.
Whitehouse said it is still unclear how to improve the intelligence gathering process to prevent similar incidents from occurring.
“I suspect there will be a much broader solution than a small specific silver bullet,” he said, adding, “It’s very difficult when you get information about a fusion center that has to go through it.” , sort it out, analyze it, and figure out what it means and reduce it so that the consumer of these services can take it to solve this problem. ”
“But certainly when a report from the Norfolk FBI says there will be a war and the information doesn’t reach the Capitol’s protection officials, something has gone wrong,” he added.
But the senator said that despite communication problems, he feels safe at the Capitol.
“In fact, I would like the barbed wire to go down as soon as possible,” he said. “As soon as the security professionals have drawn up their plan, it is not a fantastic aspect for our great Republic to have its capital crowned with barbed wire.”
Stefan Becket and Nicole Sganga contributed to the reports.