Rubio: I Simply Want to Know What the (Classified) Materials Are'

(CNSNews.com) – Both the House Judiciary Committee and the Senate intelligence committee have received letters from the Biden Justice Department, refusing their requests to review classified material retrieved from Joe Biden and Donald Trump because those materials would imperil ongoing investigations.

“It’s a silly letter, it’s a ridiculous letter — it doesn’t even answer the question we asked,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), the ranking member of the Senate intelligence committee, told Fox News’s Sean Hannity Monday night.

Press reports quote the DOJ letter to the Senate committee as saying, “We are working with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to support the provision of information that will satisfy the Committee’s responsibilities without harming the ongoing Special Counsel investigations.”

“I’m not asking for details about their investigation. I simply want to know what the materials are. That’s all I want to know,” Rubio told Hannity:

“I want to know what the materials are and I want to know what the intelligence agencies have concluded is the damage that was done from those materials being taken. And I want to know what plan we have to deal with that damage. That is the job of our committee.

“And that’s what we’re focused on. The House committees have different jurisdictions, they can go broader, they can go in different areas. Ours is pretty laser-focused.

“We need to know what those documents are so we can make a determination as to whether or not there was damage done, and whether the plan we have to mitigate that damage is sufficient. But we can’t know that because we don’t know what the material is. And their refusal to tell us is unacceptable and unsustainable.”

Rubio said he hopes DOJ will “voluntarily begin to cooperate,” or else there will be “consequences.”

Rubio said the consequences go beyond blocking nominees to budgetary matters: “We can start fencing funding, meaning they won’t be able to use money that’s appropriated to them. By law, they won’t be able to move moneys around…they’re coming to us all the time to reprogram funds, to move money from one part of the budget to another, because they need it for some other purpose.”

Rubio said this is a “straightforward” matter:

“We’ve probably seen some of these documents and materials over the years. They won’t tell us which ones they are. So how can we know if there’s a risk here, how can we know if any damage has been done, and whether the plan to mitigate that damage is sufficient, if we don’t know what we’re talking about?

“Their refusal to tell us what was exposed is not sustainable it’s not acceptable, and I think you’re going to begin to see us take action, I hope and I expect, on a bipartisan basis until they do.”

Rubio noted that the documents in questions do not belong to the FBI or the Justice Department: “They belong to the intelligence agencies that authored them. And they should be answering to us.”

According to The Hill, which obtained a copy of the letter DOJ sent to the House Judiciary Committee, DOJ wrote: “Your letter also requests non-public information that is central to the ongoing Special Counsel investigation. The Department’s longstanding policy is to maintain the confidentiality of such information regarding open matters.”

From CNSNews - READ ORIGINAL

Some media, including videos, may only be available to view at the original.