Reyes announces:
After careful consideration and consultation with the Ranking Minority Member and other members of the Committee, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence will conduct an investigation into possible violations of federal law, including the National Security Act of 1947.
This investigation will focus on the core issue of how the congressional intelligence committees and Congress are kept fully and currently informed. To this end, the investigation will examine several issues, including the program discussed during Director Panetta’s June 24th notification and whether there was any past decision or direction to withhold information from the Committee.
Three points about this.
First, Reyes says he consulted with Crazy Pete Hoekstra. I look forward to seeing how Crazy Pete spins this.
That’ll be particularly interesting given the scope here. The investigation will include the reported assassination squad. But the core issue is more general–how CIA informs Congress. Which means that, in fact, this should also include whether or not CIA fullly briefed Pelosi and Goss on torture back in 2002.
Finally, the investigation will examine whether there was any "direction" to withhold information from Congress. I do hope they look at the question generally, as well as in the context of the reported assassination squad, because I suspect we’d see a pattern of Cheney instructing the Counterterrorism folks to lie to or withhold information from Congress.
Update: Reyes (and Jan Schakowsky) also announced the appointment of Adam Lurie, formerly an AUSA in NJ’s USA office, as staff director for the Investigations Subcommittee (which Schakowsky Chairs). He’ll be the lead staffer in this investigation.