Press Releases

Washington, DC — Today, Ranking Member of the House Intelligence Committee Jim Himes wrote to Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and Director of the Central Intelligence Agency John Ratcliffe to question their recent decision to declassify and publicly release a series of highly classified documents regarding Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election and to articulate his belief that their decision may have jeopardized intelligence sources and methods.

“I write … not to relitigate the substance of judgments the intelligence community made nearly a decade ago,” Himes wrote, “but rather to express my concern that the highly irregular declassification process you engaged in could imperil critical intelligence sources and methods—a destructive action taken in order to advance a patently false political narrative.

“Two of the documents declassified and made public with only minimal redactions—namely, the annex to Special Counsel John Durham’s report and a report drafted by House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) Republican staff—were considered so sensitive and revealing of sources and methods that, until last month, HPSCI was not even permitted to retain a copy of either document within a classified safe in our own secure facility.”

The letter concluded: “Accordingly, pursuant to your statutory obligation to keep the congressional intelligence committees fully and currently informed, I request that you provide the committees with a detailed account of the process and interagency consultations each of your organizations undertook prior to releasing these sensitive documents. I also request that you make available subject-matter experts from within the intelligence community to brief the committees on the expected impact of these disclosures on current and future intelligence operations.”

The full text of the letter is available here.