Senator Sheldon Whitehouse criticized the FBI on Wednesday for a lack of transparency with Congress, saying “it is not tolerable” to have an agency that does not answer lawmakers’ questions about its actions. His comments come a day after he complained to FBI Director Christopher Wray for failing to answer written questions from lawmakers during hearings involving FBI witnesses over the past four years.
“It’s just not acceptable to have a government agency, and especially not a law enforcement agency that for years will not answer questions about its conduct,” Whitehouse, a Democrat, told anchor Elaine Quijano. Red & Blue “anchor said. .
If the FBI does not improve its process of answering questions from the legislature, Whitehouse said it would consider withholding appropriations and stopping candidates, as well as other instruments of ‘legal conviction’.
Whitehouse lamented Wray over the FBI’s response during a Tuesday Senate hearing on the Assault of the Capitol. In response, Wray quoted an “extensive interagency process for answering questions” but said he would “do what I can to improve the process”. He said he was just as “frustrated” as lawmakers are, and agreed that “we need to get better.”
Asked if he believed the FBI would change its practice, Whitehouse told Quijano, “No, they will have to prove it to me.”
‘I have proof of [a] categorical blockade of information, “he said. And I know, because we only answered 800 questions on behalf of the nominated Attorney General [Merrick] Garland, which they can do if they want to. ‘
Wray testified Tuesday as part of the Senate’s investigation into the run-up to the Capitol attack. At the end of February, the former head of the Capitol police blamed the intelligence community in his testimony and said that his force was willing to deal with the number of people they were told to expect. The former gun sergeant testified that daily intelligence reports between January 4 and January 6 “predicted the chance of civil disobedience or arrest during the protests as unlikely.”
The former House and Senate weapons sergeant said they did not see a report from an FBI field office in Norfolk, Virginia, warning law enforcement officers about an anonymous thread on social media covering the war in the Capitol does not threaten. The former Capitol police chief said the report reached police a day before the attack, but said he did not see the raw data.
“The intelligence did not reach it where it should have been,” the acting chief of police in Capitol said, adding that the January 5 report was emailed, while rather having to be communicated via a phone call or something word. ‘
Whitehouse said it was not yet clear how the intelligence gathering process could be improved to prevent similar incidents.
“I suspect there will be a much broader solution than just a specific silver bullet,” he said, adding: “It’s very difficult when you get loads of information in a fusion center that have to go through it. , sort it out, analyze it and find out what it means and limit it so that the consumer of those services can take it up to solve the problem. ‘
“But certainly when an FBI report from Norfolk says that there is going to be a war and that the information that the Capitol is protecting does not reach information, something went wrong,” he added.
But the Senator said he felt safe at the Capitol despite the communication problems.
“In fact, I want to see the barbed wire come down as soon as possible,” he said. “Once the security personnel have come up with their plan, it is not a good prospect for our great Republic to have its capital crowned in barbed wire.”
Stefan Becket and Nicole Sganga reported.