insure as a member of the executive branch before i sent it forward. a couple more questions and turn it over to the ranking member and he may consume as much time as i did. the second place you went to was the justice department. and you went to that department headed by a man bill barr who is also implicated in the complaint. and you knew that when you went to the department of justice for an opinion, correct, that bill barr was mentioned in the complaint? mr. chairman, i went to the office of legal counsel in consultation with the ic/ig. he was a part of that to receive whether or not this met the criteria. that icig vehemently disagreed with the opinion of the bill barr justice department, did he not? he still considered it a matter of urgent concern.
director of national intelligence. sandra: dana, the questions could have been changing in the last few minutes as now that complaint has been made public. lawmakers overnight were able to get a chance to look at it. you see the committee hearing room is fairly empty now. you imagine there might be a little bit of scrambling before they get underway. no doubt they will. one of the things you ll see the members of congress focus on the democrats will be very frustrated about process and timing. they ll say why did you hold this back? this is to the acting dni. why did you hold this back? we as a congress, we have the law on our side that we re supposed to get whistle-blower reports direct to us. however, the justice department office of legal counsel came out and said they concluded that a mandated disclosure to congress was not warranted because it did not address the urgent funding, administration or operation of an intelligence activity. that seems very well reasoned to many if y
wording of the law, to convey the complaint to congress. so the decision was taken to defy a subpoena of this congress, the subpoena of september 17th to turn over the complaint. who made the decision to defy that subpoena of september 17th? congressman, urgent concerns i m asking a simple question. who made the decision to defy the congressional subpoena. somebody said we will not abide by the subpoena and i would like to know who that was. nobody did. i endeavored once we no longer had you urgent concern. what i needed to do is work through the executive privilege hurdles with the office of legal counsel at the white house. although this was the most important issue to me, the white house has got quite a few other issues that they dealt with. i would have liked to have had as i said to the chairman,
an organization under which the director of national intelligence had authority and responsibility. but you are aware the past practice has been we re talking about urgent concern here, that whether you or the inspector general or anybody else it meets the statutory definition the past practice has always been to give it to committee. you re aware of that, right? i m aware this is unprecedented and with that, sir, i agree, this has never happened before but then again this is a unique situation. but you director made the decision. you made the decision to withhold it from the committee for a month when the white house had made no claim of executive privilege, when the department of justice said you don t have to give it to them, but you can. you made the decision not to. not true, sir. what the office of legal counsel said that it does not meet the legal definition of urgent concern. it said you are not required. it didn t say you cannot provide it, it said you are not
the whistle-blower protections of the ig and your team made that call. inspector general made a different call. no, sir. my team it was the department of justice office of legal counsel that made the determination that it was not urgent concern. all we wanted to do was just check and see. and to me it just seemed prudent with the matter at hand right now to be able to just make sure that in fact it did. and when it didn t i want to say once again i endeavored to get that information to this committee. just to clarify the role that the inspector general had with respect to the department of justice i heard you say he was involved in the conversations allowed to make his case but also said you give him the letter. gave justice department the letter. what was his exact involvement in making his case to the justice department. he was there physically or his