Pat Roberts Responds To Harry Reid's Closed Senate Session Stunt

Pat Roberts, Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee:

"It's interesting to me that when our staff told the Democrat staff just two days ago that, as of this next week, we are going to finish phase two, regardless of the circumstances, we're going to get done with it, then they pulled this stunt."

ROBERTS: We started this report in February. We had our first business meeting on May 17th. We started to go down the entire list of all the statements of public officials and the administration and in Congress and compare it with the intelligence. I tried to get the Democrat members to go down that entire list and vote as to whether or not that statement was credible or backed up by intelligence. That's the exact thing that we wanted to do, and they balked. And they said no, we don't want to do it that way. We want staff to do
it. We had the hearing already set up....they looked at
the Scooter Libby situation....they pull a stunt like this,
not letting anybody know they're going to go into a
secret session. Certainly not attack me, which is the
first time that that's happened and I take a personal
affront at that. And so I think it was more politics than anything else.

ROBERTS: There are a lot of public statements by members of Congress on the Democrat side that are more declarative and more aggressive than anything anybody ever said on the administration side. We're going to make those public statements public. And, now, the intelligence, we can't do that yet, because we got to go through phase two. As much as possible, I want to make this public, to prove to the American public that yesterday was a stunt

ROBERTS: We proved in the WMD report there was a worldwide intelligence failure. You look back at what somebody said.....Three or four years ago it might have made sense because you believe the intelligence...Now you prove the intelligence is wrong, what is relevant about bringing back all of these past statements? But if that's what the Democrats want, that's what they're going to get.

--LynZee
Related:
Pat Roberts Issues Statement
Cheap Trick