There are still questions on "almost everything" after Tuesday's Gang of Eight briefing about the classified materials that were seized at the homes of President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump, says Sen. Marco Rubio. And as the lack of information is hindering Congress' right to conduct oversight of the intelligence community, he tells Newsmax that the federal agencies can expect to face some pressure in return.
"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," the Florida Republican and vice-chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told Newsmax's Kilmeny Duchardt on Tuesday.
"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."
The Gang of Eight, consisting of the top four leaders in Congress and the chairmen and vice chairmen of the Senate and House Intelligence committees, got the briefing after Rubio and Senate Intelligence Chairman Mark Warner, D-Va., pushed for months for more information about the documents that were seized.
"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."
That matters, said Rubio, because even though it's not up to lawmakers to investigate the documents, they need to know if they are a threat to national security.
"If, for example, Joe Biden has highly classified material laying around his garage, what threat does that pose to the country and what are the agencies doing to protect our methods, to protect the people who gave it to us, and to protect partners that it may have come from?" the senator told Duchardt. "How can we judge whether those agencies are doing a good job of protecting our intelligence or mitigating against the danger if we don't know what intelligence they’re talking about?"
The intelligence community is telling Congress to trust them, Rubio added, but "our job is not to trust them. Our job is to work with them, to verify, and they're not allowing us to do it."
He said there is bipartisan outrage over the "unsustainable position" that has been taken, and there will be some "rough days between Congress and the intelligence community" as a result.
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."
Further, Rubio said he does not care what the special counsel in the investigation wants to happen.
"The special counsel's job of doing an investigation would not be impeded by what we're asking for, and the Justice Department does not get to veto the right of Congress to conduct oversight over the intelligence community," he told Duchardt.
Meanwhile, Attorney General Merrick Garland is being questioned by Senate Judiciary Committee Republicans Wednesday on accusations of there being a two-tiered justice system, but when asked if he saw anything in Tuesday's briefing that led him to believe that the case was handled differently for Biden than for Trump, Rubio said that would be "impossible to assess."
"Our oversight is not over the criminal justice part of it, but it's impossible to assess it because we have no idea what documents we are talking about, what material we are talking about, or how they handled one versus the other," Rubio said. "There's just no way to know it. So that’s part of the problem. The Justice Department and the Intelligence Committee are two separate things."
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