The buried Senate documents
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The buried Senate documents is an episode John Kiriakou recounted in April 2026 to illustrate what the absence of congressional oversight looks like in a particular case. He prefaced it by warning that he would have to blur some of the detail: "forgive me that I have to sort of fudge the language a little bit."

A senator asked him to come to his office. The problem was a set of documents classified in the 1970s that the senator needed to see. Kiriakou's first response was that the question should already have answered itself, because "we have a mandatory declassification law in this country after 30 or 35 years." The exceptions he names are narrow: material may be withheld if it contains "the names of a source" or "the methods of an ongoing operation." Neither could plausibly apply after half a century, and yet "they've never been declassified."

The senator had already gone to the CIA and been turned away with a denial of ownership: "we don't know what you're talking about. They're not our documents." That answer turned out to be accurate. The documents were Senate documents, and, as Kiriakou points out, "the Congress is not subject to the Freedom of Information Act." His general observation about the body is that "they always exempt themselves from their own laws", so that "no laws apply on Capitol Hill."

The remaining routes closed one by one. Kiriakou suggested going to the leadership; the senator had, and was told they did not want to get involved "in this fight between two committee chairmen." The other chairman, who controlled the documents, "told me to go screw myself." Kiriakou's account of how the meeting ended is the point of the story: "we sat there for two hours and we could not come up with a plan. And it's because there is no oversight."

See also

- Thirty-year mandatory declassification
- Congressional intelligence oversight
- Freedom of Information Act
- John Kiriakou
