WASHINGTON — An internal CIA panel concluded in a report released Wednesday that agency employees should not be punished for secretly searching computers used by Senate investigators, a move that was denounced by lawmakers last year as an assault on congressional oversight.
Rejecting the findings of previous inquiries into the matter, the CIA review group found that the employees’ actions were “reasonable in light of their responsibilities to manage an unprecedented computer system” set up for Senate aides involved in a multiyear probe of the CIA’s brutal treatment of terrorism suspects.
The agency panel, which was led by former Sen. Evan Bayh, D-Ind., cited a lack of clear ground rules between the CIA and the Senate, and it faulted CIA workers for missteps including reading e-mails of congressional investigators.
While such transgressions were “clearly inappropriate,” Bayh said in a statement released by the CIA, they “did not reflect malfeasance, bad faith, or the intention to gain improper access” to Senate material.
The findings are at odds with those reached by the CIA’s inspector general in a separate review last year and were dismissed by lawmakers including Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., the outgoing chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who led the investigation of the interrogation program.
“Let me be clear: I continue to believe CIA’s actions constituted a violation of the constitutional separation of powers,” Feinstein said in a written statement.
She noted that CIA Director John Brennan had previously apologized for the dispute but said she was “disappointed that no one at the CIA will be held accountable.”
The newly released documents provide the most detailed accounts to date of the cloak-and-dagger behavior that triggered an extraordinary feud last year between the CIA and one of two congressional panels charged with overseeing agency conduct.
The conflict centered on allegations of computer hacking and snooping, but it was in many ways a proxy for a higher-stakes fight over the Senate’s long-running investigation of the CIA’s use of torture on terrorism suspects after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
The Bayh-led panel was charged with determining whether any of the five CIA employees identified in the IG report should face discipline. Instead, the so-called “accountability review board” concluded that the CIA-Senate arrangement was so convoluted that it could find no clear rules on how the computer system was to be run, let alone whether any rules had been violated.
