Obama’s CIA Read Congressional Emails About Intel Community Whistleblowers

DC:

The CIA during the Obama administration read congressional emails discussing whistleblower complaints about activities within the intelligence community, according to newly declassified documents provided to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday.

The documents show that on March 28, 2014, I. Charles McCullough III, who then served as the Intelligence Community’s watchdog, wrote to Congress that CIA’s security division had read emails exchanged between congressional staffers and the top official in the Intelligence Community Inspector General office that protects whistleblowers.

CIA security said that the emails were picked up during a “routine counterintelligence (CI) monitoring of Government security systems,” according to McCullough, who provided the details in documents known as Congressional Notifications, or CNs.

“Most of these emails concerned pending and developing whistleblower complaints,” wrote McCullough.

McCullough also said that CIA security provided reports of the monitoring to offices where some of the whistleblowers worked.

McCullough said that though the routine monitoring was legal, he was concerned “about the potential compromise to whistleblower confidentiality and the consequent ‘chilling effect’ that the present CI monitoring system might have on Intelligence Community whistleblowing.” read more