By Zoe Tillman, From Legal Times

A Washington federal judge Wednesday refused to force the public disclosure of the full 6,963-page Senate report on CIA detention and interrogation abuses, saying Congress intended to retain control of the document.

The Senate Intelligence Committee in December released several hundred pages from the report, which provided new details on the scope of the CIA’s detention and interrogation program. The full report remained secret.

Congressional records are exempt from Freedom of Information Act requests, but because the full report had been sent to the CIA and other agencies, including the U.S. Department of Justice, the Defense Department and the State Department, the American Civil Liberties Union asked the court to force those agencies to produce the report in its entirety.

U.S. District Judge James Boasberg said that although the committee sent the report to other agencies, there was evidence that Congress intended to “retain control” over the document.

When the agencies received the full report in December, for instance, then-Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, D-California, sent an accompanying letter restricting the agencies from distributing the report outside the executive branch.

The committee’s decision not to release the full report to the public further undermined the ACLU’s argument that Congress intended to give up control of the report when it provided copies to the executive branch, the judge said.

Boasberg wrote:

At the end of the day, the ACLU asks the court to interject itself into a high-profile conversation that has been carried out in a thoughtful and careful way by the other two branches of government. As this is no trivial invitation, it should not be blithely accepted. Absent more convincing evidence that the SSCI Report has ‘passed from the control of Congress and become property subject to the free disposition of the agenc[ies] with which the document resides’ … the court must hold that it remains exempt from disclosure under FOIA. To be sure, plaintiff—and the public—may well ultimately gain access to the document it seeks. But it is not for the court to expedite that process.

The judge also denied the ACLU’s request for a copy of a separate internal CIA document commissioned by former agency director Leon Panetta.

ACLU lawyer Hina Shamsi, director of the National Security Project, said Boasberg’s ruling “keeps the American public from learning the whole truth about CIA torture.”

“While the court acknowledged that this case is no ‘slam dunk’ for the CIA, it nevertheless relied on years-old and irrelevant evidence in ruling for the agency,” Shamsi said in a statement. “The direct, contemporaneous evidence shows that the full torture report is subject to the FOIA because Congress sent it to the executive branch with instructions that it be broadly used to ensure torture never happens again.”

IMAGE: James E. Boasberg during his confirmation hearing in 2010.

Photo: Diego M. Radzinschi/THE NATIONAL LAW JOURNAL

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