The congressional "Gang of Eight" is being granted access to classified documents found at the homes of former President Donald Trump, President Joe Biden, and former Vice President Mike Pence, Punchbowl News is reporting.
The Biden administration began producing the documents last week after being pushed by Intelligence Committee Chair Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., and the panel's Vice Chair Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., the outlet said.
The Gang of Eight consists of Rubio and Warner, their counterparts of the House Intelligence Committee, and the Republican and Democrat leaders in both the Senate and House.
Special counsel Jack Smith is investigating Trump's role in the documents recovered at Mar-a-Lago. Biden's retention of classified documents in multiple spaces, including the garage of his Delaware home, is being probed by Robert Hur.
The Justice Department has maintained that turning over the documents to Congress would put the investigations at risk — an argument rejected by bipartisan lawmakers who have pressured for the release of the papers.
"Those agencies in the intelligence community have to come to Congress every year for their money and for the authorization to do things, and I think that's going to get harder here in the short term for them until we find some resolution on this topic," Rubio told Newsmax's Kilmeny Duchardt on Feb. 28.
"For them to be able to do their job, they've got to allow us to do ours," he added. "Right now, they're not."
"We have a fundamental challenge here and that is the special counsel and the Department of Justice are telling the intelligence community that they can't share with Congress more information about what exactly they found, not just at Mar-a-Lago, but in Biden's garage."
Without the information, lawmakers not only aren't able to determine if national security has been compromised but "we're not able to determine whether any of the assessments they've made about that and any steps they've taken to mitigate against that are appropriate."
Jeffrey Rodack ✉
Jeffrey Rodack, who has nearly a half century in news as a senior editor and city editor for national and local publications, has covered politics for Newsmax for nearly seven years.
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