Democratic Senators lodged complaints with the Obama Administration on Tuesday for not nominating a new inspector general to keep watch over the Central Intelligence Agency.
Addressing the Senate Intelligence Committee during a hearing to consider Susan Gibson, the president’s nominee to head the IG desk at the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) hit out at watchdog vacancies throughout the intelligence community.
“This month,” Feinstein noted in prepared remarks, “the NSA inspector general will be stepping down and the CIA has been without a Senate-confirmed inspector general since January of 2015.”
The panel’s ranking member added that she called on President Obama last June to nominate a successor to William Buckley. At the beginning of last year, Buckley resigned from his IG post at the agency.
“I renew this request and ask him to ensure NSA does not languish without a senate-confirmed IG,” Feinstein said on Tuesday.
Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) also noted his objections to the administration’s refusal to appoint a new CIA watchdog.
“I’d like to state for the record my concern that the administration has not nominated a new inspector general for the CIA in almost a year and a half,” he said during the proceedings. “A position of such importance should not be vacant and I am disappointed that the administration has not made this a higher priority,” Heinrich added.
There remains palpable distrust between the Senate Intelligence Committee and the CIA under the leadership of Director John Brennan.
Before leaving his IG post, Buckley released a report in 2014 finding that CIA officers improperly spied on the activity of committee investigators, as they were preparing their sweeping report on the agency’s post-9/11 torture program.
Speaking on the floor in March 2014, Feinstein called the spying episode a “defining moment for the oversight of our intelligence community.”
On Tuesday, Senators lauded the president’s nominee to head up the NRO. Gibson is slated to be the first Senate-confirmed IG at the organization—a new requirement enshrined into law by a 2013 intelligence authorization bill.
Working more than a decade within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), Gibson played a role in creating the agency and providing counsel to its chiefs.
She also stated in her opening statement that she assisted in re-drafting Executive Order 12333—a secret spying authority created by President Reagan that governs much of the spy community’s international activities. It reportedly underpins secret domestic surveillance, too.
Most of the NRO’s activities are cloaked in secrecy. According to its public website, the agency “develops and operates unique and innovative overhead reconnaissance systems and conducts intelligence-related activities for US national security.”
