Lawmakers are seen as serving more like cheerleaders than watchdogs. | AP Photos Hill assailed over NSA oversight

Splashing America’s surveillance secrets on the front pages of newspapers for nearly nine months has created an array of scapegoats, from Edward Snowden to the NSA and President Barack Obama.

Now the blame is also spreading to Congress.


Cries of lax Capitol Hill oversight are piling up as Snowden-inspired stories continue to explode in the media, casting doubt on whether the legislative watchdogs can be trusted to oversee national security agencies that they’ve long defended.

Intelligence Committee leaders from the House and Senate insist they’ve done their due diligence but acknowledge that lawmakers can glean only as much information as the president and his team will share. And even then, anything of such a highly classified nature can’t be legally disclosed anyway.

Still, a “trust us” promise from the lawmakers with the highest of high-security clearances isn’t satisfying critics.

Among Snowden’s stated reasons for leaking stolen documents to select members of the press: Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, for asking “softball questions” of national security officials during public hearings. “The system failed comprehensively,” the former National Security Agency contractor told The Washington Post in December.

“For 10 years, there’s been so much mystery about it,” Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee, said in an interview. “Our government, and maybe I’m at fault too, because we don’t do enough oversight, but there’s a lot more that could have been made public.”

“If there had been more information out there, there would have been less suspicion and not all these questions being raised,” he added.

Many members of Congress have revolted out of frustration that the Obama administration and their fellow lawmakers haven’t done enough to address concerns about overreach in U.S. surveillance programs. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) sued the president. The House last summer came within a dozen votes of passing legislation to curb the NSA’s powers. And turf be damned, multiple House and Senate panels that share jurisdiction over intelligence and national security issues are forging ahead with their own inquiries.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) is even pushing a resolution to create a new Senate investigative panel that can dig in on all the surveillance issues already under the purview of the Intelligence committees. The existing panels, he said, can’t be trusted to do their job.

“Clearly, they’ve been co-opted. There’s no doubt about that,” McCain told POLITICO.

It’s a classic Washington story in which Congress and national security agencies end up in lock step, with lawmakers seen as serving more like cheerleaders than watchdogs. Four decades ago, then-Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John Stennis (D-Miss.) was widely quoted telling the CIA’s leaders he didn’t want to know what they were doing.

Responding to media reports after Watergate that the intelligence agencies had overstepped their bounds, Congress created the House and Senate Intelligence committees. It also imposed term limits on the new panels’ members out of concern that lawmakers would get too cozy with the agencies they were charged with overseeing.

While the Senate got rid of its term limits in 2004 — the counterargument prevailed that too much turnover meant the panel kept losing valuable expertise — some of the members now serving there say the temptation remains to protect the intelligence agencies. The inherent inclination to give the spy world the benefit of the doubt in the name of national security was amplified exponentially after the horror of Sept. 11.

“What happens when you get on the committee, right away the intelligence community sweeps in and basically starts the process of trying to kind of say, ‘Well, these are tough issues.’ And, in effect, only one point of view gets conveyed,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a longtime Intelligence Committee member and NSA critic, said in an interview. “It’s our job to do vigorous oversight and not just get caught up in the culture that makes you, in effect, something more like an ambassador than a vigorous overseer.”

“You can get caught up in that world. There’s a certain glamour to it I think for a lot of elected officials,” explained freshman Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), one of the Intelligence Committee’s newest members.

At a recent hearing, Heinrich saw firsthand how difficult public oversight can be while pressing CIA Director John Brennan on his agency’s interrogation and detention programs. When Brennan replied that he’d rather answer in a private session, Feinstein cut off her fellow Democrat’s line of questioning.

“I’d only say we view our roles somewhat differently,” Heinrich later said of Feinstein during an interview.

Tensions over the quality of Hill oversight are also in the open between Feinstein and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who has held several public hearings dedicated to the government’s surveillance programs since the first Snowden stories appeared last June. Feinstein, so far, has presided over one open session specific to the issue, though the topic has come up in other hearings, too.

In a recent interview with Vermont Public Radio, Leahy took a not-so-subtle jab at Feinstein by noting it was his panel that had challenged the NSA’s claim that the telephone bulk collection metadata program had prevented more than 50 terrorist attacks.

“It was like pulling teeth; it took me five hearings to get all this information out. And also it made it very clear to me that a lot of committees had not done as much work as they should, and I will continue to do them in the Judiciary Committee,” Leahy said. He also noted that investigating the intelligence agencies was “one of the reasons I stayed as chair of the Judiciary Committee” rather than use his seniority to claim the gavel of the powerful Appropriations Committee.

But intelligence officials are quick to remind critics just how much scrutiny they face, ticking off oversight from the White House, Justice Department, federal judges and lawmakers. “The NSA is the most heavily regulated industry in the world,” George Ellard, the NSA inspector general, said during a recent event at the Georgetown University Law Center.

House and Senate leaders from the Intelligence committees say their critics have it wrong. Oversight is intense but often cloaked because the material is classified. Many of the complaints come from people who really just disagree with the programs that the NSA, CIA and others are using to keep Americans safe.

“I don’t know if I can say exactly what I think of that theory as it might not be fit for print. That is so off the mark,” House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) said when asked about charges that his panel had been AWOL. He noted that his review of what the government has been doing found “nothing illegal, nothing untoward, no rogue agency.”

“Not liking it is different than not overseeing it,” Rogers added. “Huge difference. And I take exception to those that say there was not proper oversight.”

Rogers said his panel is still looking for ways to be more public in its oversight role, but that’s not easy when America’s enemies are watching, too.

“Transparency cannot be on the front page of the newspaper. That’s not transparency. That’s a catastrophic loss of classified information at that point,” he said. “The transparency part is they can’t do these activities without coming to elected representatives in the U.S. Congress and having these debates for approval and policy review and funding. That all happened.”

In a statement to POLITICO, Feinstein defended her committee’s efforts by highlighting its recent launch of a bipartisan review into all intelligence collection programs, including the telephone bulk collection and spying on U.S. allies. Her panel has held more than 60 hearings this session — at least five have been open — and regularly looks into budgets, covert action programs and intelligence collection and analysis.

“I take my responsibility to conduct thorough oversight of the intelligence community very seriously, and I believe the committee performs that function well,” Feinstein said. “It is the nature of intelligence oversight that, if done well, much of it is never known publicly.”

Several Intelligence committee members said they are not too friendly with national security agencies. “I’ve been on the intelligence committee for 15, 20 years now. I don’t feel at all co-opted,” said Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), who holds an ex-officio slot on the panel as chairman of the Armed Services Committee.

Levin blamed intelligence agencies for putting up so many fights, noting a three-year battle with the CIA to make public the panel’s investigation on torture. “I’ve seen a lot of frustration with a lack of response from the intelligence community,” he said.

Rep. Jeff Miller (R-Fla.) recalled lawmakers’ spirited back-and-forth with Brennan, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and FBI Director James Comey during a recent House Intelligence Committee hearing.

“You can see tension very clearly between the intelligence community directors and this committee,” he said. “This is a very independent committee.”

The House panel’s private hearings — there have been more than 30 this Congress, compared with about 10 open or partially open sessions — are where some of the real work gets done, said Rep. Mike Conaway (R-Texas). “When there’s no cameras, you get a much different analysis of what’s going on,” he said. “The conversation is better. It’s not nearly as stilted.”

Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.) said he’s been trying to improve his oversight skills by taking a crash course on intelligence issues since he joined the panel in early 2013, holding about five meetings a week with experts in the field.

“Nobody has anything approaching what we have,” Pompeo said, citing both Congress and the special federal court that oversees the intelligence agencies. “You can absolutely make the case that while there’s no perfection here either, it’s the best [system] devised by humankind for a way to provide oversight on a country’s incredibly important intelligence operations.”

But Pompeo also said he has witnessed shortcomings, including lawmakers who don’t serve on the Intelligence Committee and don’t heed offers to attend classified briefings.

“My observation has been you have too many members of Congress who don’t want to spend time on this. I think that’s most unfortunate,” he said.

Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), who joined the House Intelligence panel at then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s request in 2007, called it a “really, really challenging assignment” to conduct adequate oversight in part because she has no personal staffer to consult with the proper security clearance.

In the Senate, each Intelligence Committee member has at least one staffer in his or her personal office with adequate security clearance. But in the House, panel members must rely on committee aides who first answer to Rogers and ranking member Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Md.).

“We have fine staff. But they don’t report to me,” Schakowsky said. “So we’re part-timers. I’ve got a lot of other priorities to deal with. You could definitely spend full time doing intelligence.”

Geoffrey Stone, a University of Chicago law professor who served on a White House-charted task force that studied the government’s surveillance programs, said in an interview that he’s heard from several House Intelligence Committee members frustrated with the quality of information they get from the national security agencies. In some instances, Stone said the members told him that his panel knew more than they did.

“That was bizarre. But I think part of it is we were very aggressive, and also we had [former Deputy CIA Director] Mike Morell and [former White House counterterrorism adviser] Richard Clarke, who knew what questions to ask that I wouldn’t know.”

Stone said he’s not surprised that Intelligence Committee leaders like Rogers and Feinstein would get defensive with their work. “It’s hard to say, ‘Oh, we were wrong.’ Just given human nature, it’s not surprising that they’ve circled their wagons,” he said. “But it’s unfortunate because I really do think this is an instance in which I don’t think they asked all the right questions.”