Grassley: CIA ‘bungled’ report on ‘Zero Dark Thirty’

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) blasted the Department of Defense inspectors general for “bungling” a report on how classified information was leaked to Hollywood producers making the film “Zero Dark Thirty.”

“The Taxpayers’ money got wasted,” Grassley said on the Senate floor Thursday. “What good came from this effort? … It is a second class piece of work that isn’t worth the paper it is written on.”

{mosads}Grassley said whistleblowers notified his office that the Department of Defense’s deputy IGs, Lynne Halbrooks and James Ives, were “sitting on the report” in an effort to advance their careers. He said she failed to give the Department of the Defense all of the information.

“Halbrooks and Ives kept the investigative team in the dark — like a bunch of mushrooms,” Grassley said.

Grassley said Congress asked for the report on how movie producers got so much insider information for their film about the killing of Osama bin Laden. But he said the report was “gutted” and useless.

He said the report was a “tangled bureaucratic mess” that let Leon Panetta, the secretary of Defense at the time, “skate.”

— This article was updated at 11:50 a.m. on Dec. 8.