House Intel chairman pushes for release of bin Laden documents

The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee wants the government to release intelligence gathered during the 2011 raid of Osama bin Laden’s compound, the Weekly Standard reports.

Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) is lobbying the Trump administration to make the documents public. He says they are an important resource for those trying to build an understanding of al Qaeda and its operations.

“Those documents need to get out, especially as you see the growth of al Qaeda and ISIS,” he told the Weekly Standard, referring to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

{mosads}”Those documents need to get out for historians to have those records so that we can begin to build a history of what al Qaeda was, what it is today, what they were thinking at the time.”

National security officials reportedly told the Weekly Standard that the Trump administration is open to releasing the documents.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, under the Obama administration, released some documents taken from the Bin Laden raid between May 2015 and January 2017, when the last of the documents was released.

Nunes has long advocated declassifying the bin Laden documents, and successfully inserted language in 2014 legislation requiring the Obama administration to review them for release.

The Obama administration did release some of the materials from the compound, but conservatives have long questioned whether other documents were held back for political reasons.