WASHINGTON ― Two senior members of the Senate Intelligence Committee are warning they know about potential misconduct by the Central Intelligence Agency, but they can’t say what it is.
In a public letter to CIA director John Ratcliffe, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) revealed on Wednesday he’d sent another letter, apparently classified, expressing alarm about something the agency is doing.
Advertisement
“I write to alert you to a classified letter I sent you earlier today, in which I express deep concerns about CIA activities,” Wyden said in the letter, which his office released Wednesday afternoon. “Thank you for your attention to this important matter.”
That’s all the letter says.
Wyden previously delivered cryptic warnings about the CIA’s sister agency, the National Security Agency.
“I want to deliver a warning this afternoon,” he said in a Senate floor speech in 2011. “When the American people find out how their government has secretly interpreted the Patriot Act, they will be stunned and they will be angry.”
Advertisement
Two years later, NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed an extensive global and domestic surveillance operation that hoovered up Americans’ phone records in bulk. A federal court later ruled that the mass surveillance program was illegal.
In a brief interview on Thursday, Wyden declined to explain the letter, saying the matter is classified.
“The reason I sent the public letter is that is all that I’m allowed to say publicly, and I’m gonna leave it at that,” he told HuffPost. “I said what I did for a specific reason. I wrote it for a specific reason. That’s all I can say.”
Advertisement
A CIA spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Joining Wyden’s is the committee’s top Democrat, Sen. Mark Warner (Va.). A spokesperson for Warner said the senator “shares many of the concerns expressed by Senator Wyden in his letter, and in fact he has expressed them to DCIA Ratcliffe himself.”
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, declined to comment.