WASHINGTON — House Democrats are working on new legislation to force the Trump administration to release secret findings on the full extent of Saudi Arabia’s role in the brutal killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.

A massive defense spending bill that became law in December ordered the country’s top intelligence official to send Congress an unclassified report identifying those responsible for Khashoggi’s death at a Saudi consulate in 2018. But that official, the director of national intelligence, failed to do so by the required mid-January deadline, prompting complaints from lawmakers.

In February, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence responded by sending Congress a letter saying the office couldn’t provide any unclassified information about Khashoggi’s death, as well as a classified annex with intelligence officials’ findings. Though part of the defense bill allowed for such an annex, lawmakers have said the ODNI hasn’t met the conditions set out in the law. Declassifying the annex, while making some necessary redactions, would fulfill ODNI’s obligations without harming national security, House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff told the office.

Press reports citing unnamed US officials have revealed that the CIA concluded that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman ordered Khashoggi’s killing at the consulate in Istanbul, Turkey. But the crown prince has denied that he was involved, and President Donald Trump has given him the benefit of the doubt. Khashoggi, a critic of the Saudi regime, was reportedly tortured, killed, and dismembered with a bone saw by a squad of more than a dozen men. If released, the ODNI annex could provide the administration’s first public acknowledgment of the breadth of the Saudi government’s role in Khashoggi’s death.

“I can’t talk about the content,” New Jersey Rep. Tom Malinowski, a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said this week. “But I can tell you that it is a thorough accounting of responsibility for the murder of Jamal Khashoggi and exactly the sort of thing that should be before the public so that we can have an informed debate about our relationship with Saudi Arabia.”

But Congress has yet to receive the declassified annex. Now, Schiff and his team are escalating their efforts, looking at measures to further compel ODNI to declassify the document, which would allow Congress to make it public.

“There can be no accountability for the brutal murder of Jamal Khashoggi until the Administration makes public what the U.S. government knows regarding who in the Saudi government ordered, carried out, and attempted to cover-up the killing,” Schiff said in a statement to BuzzFeed News. “Since ODNI has failed to comply with [the law], Congress will need to take further legislative and budgetary steps to ensure declassification of a report the Intelligence Community provided to Congress earlier this year.”

Those legislative steps, according to a committee official, would be comparable to a yearslong effort in Congress to pressure the Obama administration to declassify a different secret document about Saudi Arabia that had been hidden from the public on national security grounds: the so-called 28 pages from Congress’s 9/11 report that alleged links between the Saudi government and those who perpetrated the terrorist attacks. The pages were declassified by the administration and subsequently released by the House Intelligence Committee in July 2016 following a bipartisan public pressure campaign that involved a series of bills and resolutions.

“The Committee is considering a similar legislative approach to require declassification of a classified report on Khashoggi’s murder that ODNI provided to Congress in February 2020,” the committee official said, speaking on background. “The legislation under consideration would require ODNI to declassify the report it provided to Congress in February 2020, consistent with provisions of the 2019 NDAA and [the Intelligence Authorization Act] that required ODNI to submit an unclassified report.”

But ODNI “believes its response satisfies Congress’s specific requests,” a spokesperson for the office said; the provisions in the defense bill allowed for a classified annex and a report that protected the sensitive sources and methods used by the intelligence community. “The IC has consistently provided our oversight committees with all relevant intelligence,” wrote Matt Lahr, deputy assistant DNI for strategic communications. “This particular request asks us to make that intelligence available to the public. That is something that cannot be done without jeopardizing sources and methods.”

In February, ODNI told lawmakers the same thing: hat it could not provide any unclassified information about Khashoggi’s death due to concerns about revealing sources and methods. The letter, provided to BuzzFeed News by the office of Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden — who authored one of the provisions calling for an unclassified report on Khashoggi’s killing — was just over one page long and accompanied the classified annex.