McClatchy’s findings are based on information found in official documents and provided by people with knowledge of the dispute being fought in the seventh-floor executive offices of the CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Va., and the committee’s high-security work spaces on Capitol Hill.
The people who spoke to McClatchy asked not to be identified because the feud involves highly classified matters and carries enormous consequences for congressional oversight over the executive branch.
In other words....this was illegally leaked. By whom and why, I wonder.
Good question. This is definitely a psy-ops warfare, as both sides might have an interest in getting the "first mover" advantage by leaking this development.
Senate Committee staffers have an incentive to portray the agency as paranoid and "insubordinate," to inoculate themselves from the charges of "stealing" the proof of classified info they clearly had been given access to.
CIA'a interest is to gain an advantage in the possible hearings or election-style political posturing, by preempting the possible disclosure and mischaracterization / misrepresentation of raw data, and painting the Committee members and staffers as "thieves and leakers" who are not to be trusted now and in the future with access to some classified documents and [preliminary or ex post facto] intelligence.
From Senate staffers slipped secret CIA documents from agency's headquarters - McClatchy DC, 2014-03-05, by Jonathan S. Landay, Ali Watkins and Marisa Taylor :
..... Some committee members regard the monitoring as a possible violation of the law and contend that their oversight powers give them the right to the documents that were removed. On the other hand, the CIA considers the removal as a massive security breach because the agency doesn't believe that the committee had a right to those particular materials. said a U.S. official who was among those who spoke to McClatchy. "You've got to be asking yourself why the agency would be willing to take such a risk. The documents must be so damned loaded." ..... < snip > ..... The extraordinary battle has created an unprecedented breakdown in relations between the spy agency and its congressional overseers and raises significant implications for the separation of powers between the legislative and executive branches of the government. It also has fueled uncertainty over how much of the committee's report will ever be made public. ..... < snip > < snip > ..... In a combative statement issued Wednesday evening, CIA Director John Brennan chastised unidentified senators for making "spurious allegations about CIA actions that are wholly unsupported by the facts." ..... < snip >
Given this, my money is on CIA leaking first. One, they have very little to lose, and much to gain, in future dealings with Senate / Congress overseers.
Two, the Senate staff was clearly fishing for something that could be politically described as a "proof of torture" than anything they could find before in "the materials that were taken from CIA headquarters [which] found their way into a database into which millions of pages of top-secret reports, emails and other documents were made available to panel staff after being vetted by CIA officials and contractors" - which means they currently don't have anything tangible that they really wanted to have for their political case.
On the other hand, the Democrats didn't really have to go to great lengths to be able to refer to the "classified information obtained from the CIA by the Senate Committee oversight panel" for their political purposes, so any leaks to the media/McClatchy would only be defensive, needed as a damage control, and in this case they don't have much more than a strategy of "rank superiority and indignation."
But it also allows them a little offensive play, to give the impression and imply that any info they supposedly had the right to "take" was of a "damned loaded" variety.
My score for now: CIA - 1, Senate Democrats - 0