The Select Committee on Intelligence was preceded by the
Church Committee (1975). Senator
Daniel K. Inouye (D-Hawaii) became the first chair of the committee when it was established and remained in the role until 1979. On July 8, 2004, the committee issued the ''
Report of the Select Committee on Intelligence on the U.S. Intelligence Community's Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq'', and on June 5, 2008, it issued a long-delayed portion of its "phase two" investigative report, which compared the prewar public statements made by top Bush administration officials to justify the invasion with the intelligence information that was available to them at that time. In a March 6, 2008, letter to the Senate leadership, 14 of the 15 then members of the Committee proposed the creation of a new Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Intelligence to prepare the annual intelligence budget. The proposed Subcommittee, on which members of the Intelligence Committee would be heavily represented, would increase the Committee's influence and leverage over
executive branch intelligence agencies, and require continuing disclosure of the annual budget for the National Intelligence Program. The proposal has been opposed by the leadership of the
Senate Appropriations Committee, however. In 2013, and beyond, the SSCI received renewed attention in the wake of
Edward Snowden's disclosures regarding the
NSA surveillance of communications. Senator
Dianne Feinstein and the SSCI made several statements on the matter, one of which was notably disputed: that the
NSA tracked US citizens' locations via cellphone. Later, the SSCI Staff Director, David Grannis, claimed that the NSA did not collect cellphone location, claiming the Senator was "speaking extemporaneously". The SSCI later came to prominence in relation to voting to publish in March 2014 and then publishing in December 2014 of a
report on the policies of the CIA on torture. In 2017, the SSCI began investigating
Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections, possible incriminating links between members of the Russian government and members of
Donald Trump's presidential campaign team, and the security of election processes in the United States. On April 21, 2020, the SSCI (chaired at the time by the Republican
Richard Burr) released a much redacted report with its final judgment that the intelligence community's assessment was "coherent and well-constructed"; the SSCI therefore supports the intelligence community's claim that Putin's "interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election" in favor of candidate Trump was unprecedented in its "manner and aggressiveness". Nevertheless, no direct evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia was found. In 2018, the SSCI Director of Security
James Wolfe was arrested and convicted of lying to the FBI on the leak of classified documents to a reporter with whom he was in an affair. On May 14, 2020, Senator Burr, who oversaw the probe on Russian interference in the 2016 election, stepped down as SSCI chair due to an
ongoing investigation regarding insider trading by Senator Burr during the
COVID-19 pandemic. Senator McConnell announced on May 18, 2020 that
Marco Rubio would replace Burr temporarily. ==Members, 119th Congress==