Not long after being sworn into the Senate, Kamala Harris found herself in the center of an unfolding national security drama. Donald Trump, resentful of having the legitimacy of his victory questioned, was at war with his own spy agencies for accusing Russia of interfering in the 2016 election to benefit Trump. And Richard Burr, the Republican chairman of the Senate’s Intelligence Committee, was vacillating over how aggressively to investigate the perceived threat to American democracy.
Harris, a freshman member with no prior national security experience, was the committee’s newest appointee.
Behind closed doors, she played a pivotal role in pushing the Republican majority panel to conduct an aggressive and thorough investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, according to staff and members who served with her. She also got a whirlwind national security education that has had a lasting impact on the worldview she now holds as the Democratic presidential nominee, those who worked with her tell NOTUS.
Week after week, in a windowless, cold room on the second floor of the Hart Senate Office Building — Room 219 to be specific — Harris, both in her role in the Russian investigation and on the committee at large, was introduced to what one former spy called the “wilderness of mirrors,” the clandestine world of espionage, influence and geopolitical intrigue in which intelligence agencies routinely operate.
NOTUS interviewed numerous Democratic senators who served alongside Harris on the panel, staffers who overlapped with Harris on the Hill, as well as several former Senate Intelligence Committee staff. Republicans who served with her in the Senate have expressed some admiration for Harris, but several current and former members and staff declined to comment on their service with her on intelligence.
The Senate Intelligence Committee ultimately produced a five-volume report totaling more than 1,300 pages — going into far more detail than the better-known Mueller report ever did. Its hearings branched into topics that still resonate today: social media disinformation, Russian clandestine activities, Kremlin interference in European politics and much more. It also got a detailed look at a lot of the counterintelligence information the government had collected, which was far more material than Robert Mueller drew upon to draft his report.
More importantly, it remained the only truly bipartisan document to come out of the entire affair, with Republicans and Democrats signing their names to the final report. The House Intelligence Committee’s separate investigation, by contrast, devolved into a partisan brawl and majority Republicans and minority Democrats ended up issuing separate reports.
“You can’t look at this issue without considering the timing and context in which she arrived in the Senate,” said Halie Soifer, who was Harris’ national security adviser during her early days in the Senate. “Her first month in Washington was also Donald Trump’s.”
Her time on the panel “solidified her worldview in terms of the importance of defending democracies and multilateral alliances,” Soifer said of the panel’s work on assessing Russia’s global campaign against the U.S. and its allies.
It was also Harris, a newcomer to the panel and to Washington writ large, who prodded her fellow committee members to conduct an aggressive investigation that would stand up to public scrutiny, according to two people who were in the room at the time and two other congressional staffers briefed later on closed-door deliberations of the panel.
“It’s a committee that we always prided ourselves with bipartisanship, particularly back when we were doing the Russia investigation,” Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the panel, told NOTUS. “She fit very much into that mold, or, you know, had the committee work together on items, but she also was not at all intimidated about asking hard and tough questions.”
Three people said it was Harris, drawing on her experience as a prosecutor, who laid out expectations for what senators and staff should be doing and how they should divvy up responsibilities. And one person said that when other senators hesitated at the possibility of authorizing certain investigative steps like interviewing Trump’s family, it was Harris who pushed them to follow every investigative thread to its conclusion. (And indeed, the GOP-led panel would end up subpoenaing Donald Trump Jr. and interviewing Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, twice.)
“They came out of there saying, ‘Wow, she fucking knows what she’s doing,’” recalled one former Democratic Senate aide whose boss was in the 2017 closed-door meeting.
Though she was the most junior member of the committee during her first two years — and therefore the last to ask questions of witnesses in multi-hour marathon hearings — Harris developed a reputation as an effective interrogator of people appearing before the panel, drawing on her courtroom experience.
“I was glad I wasn’t on the other side of some of her questions,” said Maine Sen. Angus King, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats. “She was very tough, but not, you know, not disagreeable, but just assertive.” Republican Sen. Josh Hawley, who overlapped with Harris on the Judiciary Committee concurred: “I thought her questions were sharp,” he recalled.
Her Intelligence Committee stint also gave Harris unique insight into what would become the defining challenge of U.S. foreign policy: Russia’s aggressive globe-spanning campaign against democratic governments culminating in its invasion of Ukraine.
Like many newcomers to the Senate with an eye on higher office, Harris knew she needed foreign policy experience. The only way to get onto the Intelligence Committee is to ask leadership for the appointment. Democratic leader Chuck Schumer appointed her to the panel despite the fact that another Californian, Dianne Feinstein, was already on it. (Leadership rarely appoints two members from the same state, one former staffer said.)
For members, the appointment is usually a low-profile assignment — something more akin to volunteer service. It confers no real political benefits that members can brag about back home or use for fundraising at K Street events.
The Senate Intelligence Committee and its House counterpart “are not moneymakers,” said Ronald Marks, a former CIA case officer who later served as the agency’s congressional liaison and a Senate staffer to Republicans Bob Dole and Trent Lott. “It’s not like I’m going to go back to my home state and tell you how I got another $15 billion on the secret program that’s going to be built in my state.”
Stripped of the grandstanding typical of most open committee hearings, members get to ask about what they’re interested in — whether substantive or not. Committee staff and intelligence officials recalled one senator asking an intelligence community briefer about what was really at Area 51, and another pressed a Tibet expert for the real-world location of Shangri-La, a mythical city described in a 1933 work of fiction. But most intelligence officials who interacted with the panel said members, by and large, took their responsibilities of overseeing the intelligence community seriously.
“They’re getting unique stuff into given information that helps them understand maybe a little better some of the other issues that are going on on their other committees,” said Marks.
According to interviews with congressional staff, new members are typically given some basic orientation material: primers on what the more than a dozen U.S. spy agencies do, help understanding the acronym soup of technical intelligence collection and high-level briefings with senior officials.
They’re given access to classified intelligence and they take field trips to facilities run by intelligence agencies. They get opportunities to travel abroad and they sometimes get a chance to meet with top CIA and defense intelligence officials stationed abroad or foreign spy chiefs. Harris threw herself into learning about intelligence in her early months on the panel, members and former staff said. She took a Middle East trip with Burr, then-chairman, in 2018 that took her to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, among other places.
Observers of the intelligence community hope that Harris developed an appreciation for the strengths and weaknesses of intelligence collection in her four years on the panel. The CIA, the NSA and other U.S. intelligence agencies have significant capabilities — but they are not wizards. There have been notable failures, especially when the analysts have been asked to predict the future.
“The IC brilliantly detects and tracks missiles, aircraft and ships; it also has good access to valuable political information, especially in the developing world, yet it failed to accurately assess Iraqi WMD, and it failed to assess the futility of intervening in Vietnam or Afghanistan or the demise of the former Soviet Union. Knowing what intel to trust and what to doubt is important for senior policymakers,” said Christopher Mellon, who served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence and did a stint on the panel as the staff director.
Harris also tried to cut a middle ground on questions of national security authorities and civil liberties. When a controversial electronic spy authority came up for renewal in 2017, Harris acted as a liaison between colleagues worried about American civil liberties and others concerned with hobbling national security agencies. The thorniest issue in the debate, which was about whether to renew a law called Section 702, was about whether to require search warrants when querying intelligence databases for information about Americans.
“You know, for FISA 702 she was a real force for the proposition that there are serious challenges with respect to protecting the American people,” Sen. Ron Wyden, a major critic of the way the 702 program is run, told NOTUS.
Harris tried to craft a bipartisan compromise — joining in a coalition with Republican Mike Lee and fellow Democrats Patrick Leahy and Feinstein in trying to put in place a warrant requirement. Wyden supported a different warrant proposal — but counted Harris an ally in the fight.
“I believe she gets the central challenge, and that is that security and liberty aren’t mutually exclusive,” he said. “Good policies can give you more of both. Not-so-good policies give you less of both. And I think that is what I always looked for in leaders.”
Harris voted against the reauthorization. Though when the Biden administration opposed a warrant requirement when the law came up for renewal again this year, Harris largely stayed silent during the debate.
One mystery about Harris’ time on the committee, however, remains. Was it her time on the Senate Intelligence Committee that made her famously phobic of Bluetooth headphones, as Politico reported in 2021?
In her nearly four years on the panel, Harris showed an interest in the security of digital devices. The first question she ever asked as a member of the panel was about the security of then-President-elect Donald Trump’s cell phone and Twitter account. And Bluetooth headphones have known security vulnerabilities — and spy agencies like nothing better than exploiting technological vulnerabilities.
“I don’t know if she picked that with the committee, but that is an issue. We wouldn’t use Bluetooth headphones either,” said Kerry Sutten, who served as the Democratic staff director of the committee.
—
Byron Tau is a reporter at NOTUS. John T. Seward is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow. Haley Byrd Wilt, a reporter at NOTUS, contributed to this report.