Welcome to the deep dive. We are we're so glad
you're here with us today. Yeah, really glad
to be here. Because today we're asking a question
that, well, it sounds like it belongs in a geopolitical
spy thriller. It definitely does. But it's actually
one of the most critical foundational functions
of the American government. And that question
is simply who watches the watchmen. Right. And
more specifically, you know, who watches them
when those watchmen happen to be the most secretive.
heavily funded and technologically advanced intelligence
agencies on the face of the planet? It's a massive
question. I mean, it's huge. It really is. We
are taking a comprehensive look today at a Wikipedia
overview detailing the United States Senate Select
Committee on Intelligence. Right. And in Washington,
you will almost always hear this simply referred
to as the SSCI. The SSCI. So our mission for
you today is to unpack exactly how this this
incredibly small rotating group of senators manages
to hold. the purse strings. And the oversight
power. Exactly. The oversight power over the
entire U .S. intelligence community. We're talking
about a hidden world of classified budgets, global
surveillance, covert operations. All of it. Yeah,
all of it. And the incredibly intricate system
designed to keep all that immense power in check.
It's a lot to cover. It is. OK, let's unpack
this, starting with the sheer architecture of
this oversight, because when you look at the
scope of what the single committee is responsible
for, it completely reframes how you think about
American intelligence. It really does. Their
mandate is to oversee and make continuing studies
of the intelligence activities and programs of
the United States government. Which sounds very
official. Right. But to understand what that
actually means, we have to define the intelligence
community itself. It is not just a handful of
spies in trench coats. Exactly. When most people
hear intelligence, they immediately picture the
CIA headquarters in Langley. Sure. Or maybe they
think of the NSA. But the SSCI's jurisdiction
goes so much deeper into the fabric of the government,
doesn't it? Far deeper. Yes, they oversee the
Central Intelligence Agency and the National
Security Agency, but they also oversee the Office
of the Director of National Intelligence, the
Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Geospatial
Intelligence Agency. That's a mouthful. It is.
And the National Reconnaissance Office. But here's
the part that usually surprises people. They
are also responsible for the intelligence components
of domestic and diplomatic agencies. Oh, wow.
Yeah. That means they oversee the intelligence
branches of the FBI, the Department of State,
the Treasury Department, and even the Department
of Energy. The Department of Energy having an
intelligence wing always catches people off guard.
Right. But when you remember they deal with nuclear
materials, it suddenly makes perfect sense. Absolutely.
It makes me think of an analogy. Imagine the
SSCI as a corporate board of directors, but they
aren't overseeing a company that sells software.
They are the board of directors for a massive,
heavily classified multinational conglomerate
where the various departments are dealing with
national security space reconnaissance, global
communications and nuclear threat assessments.
That's a great way to picture it. And this board
has to somehow keep track of all those moving
parts, audit their activities and crucially approve
their budgets. That board of directors analogy
works really well for visualizing their scope,
but with one massive deliberate difference. OK,
what's that? A corporate board is usually permanent,
or at least its members stay on for decades to
build institutional power. This committee is
expressly designed to do the exact opposite.
Really? Yeah, it all comes down to that word
in their title, select. The Senate Select Committee.
Right. The committee was established in 1976
by the 94th Congress as a select committee, meaning
its membership is entirely temporary. The seats
are rotated among members of the Senate chamber.
Which is such a fascinating, counterintuitive
way. To run a group that needs to understand
hyper -advanced secretive programs? I mean, why
would you constantly cycle your experts out?
What's fascinating here is the brilliant cross
-pollination design of the committee to prevent
exactly the kind of institutional stagnation
you just mentioned. Okay. The committee is made
up of 15 to 17 members. Now, the way those seats
are distributed is engineered for maximum oversight.
How so? Eight of those seats are specifically
reserved for members who already sit on four
major powerful Senate committees. Oh, I see.
They take one majority member and one minority
member from the Appropriations Committee, the
Armed Services Committee, the Foreign Relations
Committee, and the Judiciary Committee. So you
are basically pulling in the top minds who already
deal with the government's checkbook, the military
international diplomacy and the law. Precisely.
You have senators who intimately understand the
military budget sitting right next to senators
who focus entirely on the legal and constitutional
constraints of federal actions. Wow. They are
all sitting in the same secure room looking at
the same classified intelligence programs. And
just to round out the math for everyone listening,
of the remaining seats, four. go to members of
the majority party and three go to members of
the minority party. Right. Plus you have the
majority and minority leaders acting as ex officio
members. Yes. And just to clarify for anyone
unfamiliar with the term ex officio, basically
means they get a seat at the table simply because
of the leadership offices they hold, even though
they don't actually get a vote. Got it. The chair
and ranking member of the armed services committee
also get this ex officio status if they aren't
already formally on the select committee. I want
you, the listener, to imagine for a second why
this specific rotating cross -functional structure
matters to your daily life. It's vital. Think
about basic human nature. If a group of politicians
sat on the same secretive committee for 30 years,
dealing with the same spy agencies, approving
the exact same black budgets behind closed doors,
reviewing highly advanced surveillance technologies.
They would become completely entrenched. Exactly.
It would be so easy for them to become entrenched.
They might become too cozy with the very agencies
they are supposed to be regulating. By making
the membership temporary and pulling from different
areas of expertise, the system is designed specifically
to prevent that kind of dangerous coziness. It
forces fresh eyes on the country's deepest secrets.
And importantly, it guarantees that the people
holding the power of the purse are constantly
changing. Because while oversight and audits
are important, the most significant power the
SSCI wields is financial. The power of the purse.
It is the ultimate leverage in Washington. A
core responsibility of the committee is performing
an annual review of the intelligence budget submitted
by the president. Right. They then have to actually
prepare the legislation that authorizes the appropriations
for all these various civilian and military agencies.
And let's break down what that actually means
in practice. There is a big difference between
authorizing a budget and appropriating the money.
That's a good point. Authorizing is essentially
writing the rules and saying you're legally permitted
to spend this much money on this specific spy
satellite program. OK. But the Appropriations
Committee is the one that actually writes the
check. For military related intelligence, the
SSCI makes recommendations to the Senate Armed
Services Committee. Right. But for the civilian
agencies, they're deeply involved in authorizing
those funds under what is called the National
Intelligence Program. And when you control the
budget of a secretive agency, you theoretically
control the agency. But controlling that money
is not always a smooth process, especially when
other committees want a piece of that power.
Very true. Back in 2008, a massive turf war erupted
over this exact issue. It is a perfect example
of how oversight actually functions behind the
scenes. In March of 2008, 14 of the 15 members
of the SSCI Almost the entire committee, in a
very rare show of near unanimity, wrote a formal
letter to the Senate leadership. What did they
open? They proposed creating a brand new Senate
Appropriations Subcommittee on Intelligence.
Essentially, they wanted their own dedicated
checkbook. That's exactly. They wanted heavy
representation on this new subcommittee so they
could prepare the annual intelligence budget
directly, rather than just... authorizing it
and handing it off. They argued it would significantly
increase their influence and leverage over the
executive branch intelligence agencies. Furthermore,
they argued it would force continuing disclosure
of the annual budget for the National Intelligence
Program. Right. They were essentially saying
we can't properly oversee these agencies if we
don't have the ultimate leverage of writing the
actual checks. But. The leadership of the Maine
Senate Appropriations Committee looked at this
proposal and they fiercely opposed it. The proposal
was completely shot down. If we connect this
to the bigger picture, it reveals a fundamental
truth about how the government operates. Washington
is often a battleground, not just between political
parties, but between different congressional
committees fighting for jurisdiction influence
and leverage over secret budgets. Oh, absolutely.
The Appropriations Committee. already controls
government spending. They were absolutely not
about to carve out a special, powerful subcommittee
and hand that leverage over to the Intelligence
Committee. No way. Even if the SSCI argued it
was necessary for the sake of national security
oversight, giving up the purse strings means
giving up power. It is a turf war over the most
secretive turf in the world. But that tension
over what to tell the public and how to hold
these agencies accountable isn't just about budgets.
This is all. Here's where it gets really interesting,
because over the decades, the SSCI has been at
the center of some of the most sensitive, controversial
investigations in modern American history. To
really understand their investigative weight,
you have to look briefly at the climate they
were born into. Right, the 1970s. The SSCI rose
from the ashes of the famous Church Committee
of 1975. The Church Committee was a massive investigation
into decades of severe intelligence abuses by
the CIA. the FBI and the NSA, things like illegal
domestic spying and assassination plots. The
public trust was entirely broken. It was. So
when the SSCI was officially formed in 1976 to
provide permanent oversight with Senator Daniel
K. Inouye of Hawaii as its first chair, their
foundational mandate was to dig into the things
that the agencies wanted kept hidden. And we
see that mandate play out massively in the 2000s,
specifically regarding the Iraq War. The committee
undertook a multi -phase grueling investigation
into the pre -war intelligence on Iraq. This
was a monumental task. The intelligence community
had made specific assessments regarding weapons
of mass destruction, which obviously led to the
invasion. In July 2004, the SSCI issued their
first report on those pre -war assessments. But
the real friction came years later. On June 5,
2008, they issued a long -delayed portion of
their Phase II investigative report. And the
focus of that phase two report is what makes
it so critical. It didn't just look at the raw
intelligence. It specifically compared the pre
-war public statements made by top Bush administration
officials, the actual speeches and claims used
to justify the invasion to the American public
against the actual intelligence information that
was available to those officials at the time.
Think about the weight of that. You have a bipartisan
committee whose job is to audit the gap. between
what the executive branch tells the public and
what the classified documents actually say. Highlighting
that discrepancy is the very definition of oversight.
But that tension over public disclosure wasn't
just limited to foreign wars. It blew up right
here at home a few years later. In 2013, the
committee found itself in the spotlight following
Edward Snowden's disclosures regarding massive
NSA surveillance of domestic communications.
Overseeing highly classified domestic surveillance
programs while the public is actively reading
leaked details about them in the news creates
an incredibly awkward dynamic. I can imagine.
And we saw that play out in real time. During
this era, Senator Dianne Feinstein was the chair
of the committee. She made several public statements
trying to contextualize the NSA's capabilities.
Right. But one statement was immediately and
fiercely disputed. She claimed that the NSA tracked
U .S. citizens' locations via their cell phones.
Which, as you can imagine, caused an absolute
uproar. Privacy advocates were already on high
alert, and having the chair of the Intelligence
Committee casually mention cell phone location
tracking was like throwing gasoline on a fire.
It really was. But what happened next highlights
the high wire act of this committee. The SSCI's
own staff director at the time, David Grannis,
had to publicly intervene. A staffer had to walk
back the comments of the powerful committee chair.
That rarely happens. Grannis stated that the
NSA did not collect cell phone location data,
and he claimed that Senator Feinstein was simply
speaking extemporaneously. It is a remarkable
moment. It shows how difficult it is to discuss
the nuances of classified surveillance programs
in a public forum without accidentally confirming
or misstating the capabilities of those programs.
And that tension between secrecy and transparency
only escalated the following year. In 2014, the
SSCI made a decision that put their oversight
powers on the global stage. Yes. In March of
that year, the committee voted to publish a highly
sensitive deeply controversial document. By December,
they officially released a detailed report on
the policies of the CIA regarding detention and
interrogation. This is widely known in the public
sphere as the CIA Torture Report. The document
detailed the use of torture during CIA detention
and interrogation programs following 9 -11. Right.
Deciding to declassify and publish findings that
severely damage the reputation of your own intelligence
agencies is a massive highly consequential move.
It is the ultimate test of whether the committee
is willing to air the government's darkest laundry
in the name of accountability. Which brings us
into the modern era of the committee, an era
marked by incredibly complex investigations into
foreign adversaries, but also by intense human
drama and abrupt leadership shakeups. Let's talk
about the Russia probe. Starting in 2017, the
SSCI began a sprawling investigation into Russian
interference in the 2016 United States elections.
They were tasked with looking into possible Determinating
links between members of the Russian government
and members of Donald Trump's presidential campaign
team, as well as auditing the overall security
of election processes in the U .S. This was a
multi -year, deeply scrutinized investigation
that took place in one of the most polarized
political climates in modern history. Absolutely.
The investigation concluded with a report released
on April 21st, 2020. Now, at this time, the committee
was chaired by Republican Senator Richard Burr.
And despite the intense partisan divide in Washington.
they reached a very specific bipartisan conclusion.
They released a redacted report with their final
judgment on the intelligence. They found that
the intelligence community's assessment of the
situation was coherent and well constructed.
Coherent and well constructed. That is a very
specific phrase. It means the committee didn't
just take the agency's word for it. They reviewed
the raw data, analyzed the methodology, and agreed
with the findings. Specifically, the SSCI supported
the claim that Vladimir Putin's That is a critical
unified finding regarding the nature of the foreign
threat. However, the committee was also very
clear on another key conclusion, balancing the
narrative against the intelligence record. What
was that? They explicitly noted that no direct
evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign
and Russia was found. OK. This report represents
the committee executing its duty, finalizing
their findings based purely on the intelligence
assessments rather than the surrounding political
noise. But we have to remember that this committee,
despite its lofty mandate and secure vaults,
is not just made up of dry policy reports. It
is made up of human beings. And that means it
is entirely vulnerable to human flaws. For example,
in 2018, the S .S. SCI's own director of security,
James Wolfe, was actually arrested. The irony
there is stark. The director of security for
the committee tasked with keeping the nation's
secrets safe was convicted of lying to the FBI
regarding the leak of classified documents. Unbelievable.
He had leaked this classified information to
a reporter with whom he was having an affair.
It is a harsh reminder that the vulnerabilities
in a high security environment are rarely just
technological. They are almost always human.
And that human drama extended all the way to
the top leadership. We just mentioned that Senator
Richard Burr chaired the committee through the
Russia probe. But on May 14th, 2020, Senator
Burr actually had to step down as SSCI chair.
This sudden departure was due to an ongoing FBI
investigation regarding insider trading by Senator
Burr during the early days of the COVID -19 pandemic.
When the chair of the Intelligence Committee
is under active investigation by the FBI, an
agency the committee is supposed to oversee,
it forces an immediate and chaotic change in
leadership. It definitely does. Just days later,
Senator Mitch McConnell announced that Marco
Rubio would replace Burr temporarily as the acting
chair. It highlights how the carefully orchestrated
rotating nature of the committee can sometimes
be thrown into overdrive by unforeseen personal
scandals. Flashing forward to the present day,
the 119th Congress, the committee continues its
vital work. The seats have rotated again. Currently,
Tom Cotton, a Republican from Arkansas, serves
as the chair with Mark Warner, a Democrat from
Virginia serving as the vice chair. The watchmen
are still being watched. So what does this all
mean? It means that while the intelligence community
operates almost entirely in the shadows, dealing
with global threats, covert operations and massive
budgets, they do not operate unchecked. I want
you to remember that this committee, with its
rotating membership pulled from across the Senate,
is the public's primary mechanism for accountability.
Yes. They are the ones reviewing the budgets.
They investigate the failures. They debate the
limits of surveillance. It is a flawed human
system prone to scandals and turf wars, but it
is the firewall between secret power and democratic
oversight. I want to leave you with a final thought
to mull over, building on a very small but fascinating
detail buried in the text. Okay. When listing
the various agencies the committee oversees,
there is a mention of the National Reconnaissance
Office. And right next to it, it lists a specific
intelligence analysis system called Sentient.
Sentient? Just the name alone sounds like an
AI from a science fiction movie. It does. It
is an advanced, hyper -complex intelligence analysis
system. And the existence of programs like sentient
raises an incredibly important question about
the very nature of this committee structure.
The SSCI relies on a rotating temporary cast
of senators. This is designed, as we discussed,
to prevent entrenchment and coziness. But think
about the sheer complexity of the technology
they are overseeing today. Right. They aren't
just looking at troop movements on a paper map
anymore. Exactly. If you have generalist politicians
stepping into this role for a limited term, how
effectively can they truly oversee highly classified,
hyper -advanced black box technologies like the
sentient system? That's a great point. By the
time a senator fully comprehends the sheer technical
capability, the algorithms, and the global implications
of an AI -driven surveillance tool, their term
on the committee might be up. Are we reaching
a point where the technology being overseen is
simply too complex for a rotating board of lawmakers
to truly hold accountable? That is a chilling
and fascinating question to ponder. How do you
regulate what you barely have the time or the
technical background to understand? Thank you
so much for joining us on this deep dive into
the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
We hope it gave you a new perspective on the
hidden architecture of oversight, the turf wars
over secret budgets, and the very human flaws
of the people tasked with watching the watchmen.
Keep questioning the systems around you, and
most importantly, stay insanely curious. We will
catch you on the next one.