WASHINGTON – Today in the Senate Judiciary Committee, U.S. Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) discussed the Biden administration’s refusal to release classified documents seized from the residences of President Biden and former President Trump to the Senate Intelligence Committee. Excerpts are below, and video can be found here.

“Congress has a constitutional responsibility to provide oversight into the intelligence gathering by the Intelligence Community, all 17 agencies that fit under that umbrella. This is something we cannot do if the Biden Justice Department says they’re not going to share with us what intelligence products President Biden stored in his garage or stored at his think tank in in Philadelphia.” 

“What you saw, and that Senator Graham alluded to, is bipartisan outrage at the fact that the Director of National Intelligence, who’s responsible for essentially all 17 branches of the Intelligence Community, said, you know, ‘The Department of Justice tells us to stand down, we stand down. We don’t know what they have.’” 

“They’re not policymakers. They’re supposed to tell us the good, bad, and the ugly, without regard to any sort of policy or political affiliation.”

“It’s not hard to imagine some scenario in which classified information is taken out of a secure facility, made available to our adversaries, that it would threaten the national security of the United States in ways that we would need to respond to as policymakers.”

“That explains why you saw Chairman Warner, Vice Chairman Rubio, and a bipartisan group of Senators on the Intelligence Committee express outrage at this unwillingness of the Biden administration – and the Department of Justice is an arm of the Biden administration – the Biden administration blocking congressional oversight and knowledge of these classified materials by Congress, which has a constitutional responsibility to perform here.”

“This is unacceptable, and we’re going to use every tool available to us to gain access to this information.” 

“It is completely unacceptable to me, and, I believe, on a bipartisan basis, for the Biden administration to block Congress from performing its constitutional duty here, and there are issues much larger than an individual criminal investigation that I think needs to be addressed.”