Trump’s CIA watchdog pick never read Senate torture report

President Trump’s nominee to be the CIA’s watchdog told lawmakers Tuesday that he never read the Senate’s infamous torture report.

Christopher Sharpley, who has served as the CIA’s deputy inspector general since 2012, told the Senate Intelligence Committee that he had never read the full report detailing how the CIA treated terror suspects after 9/11, The Associated Press reported.

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Democrats criticized Sharpley for not reading the report in full, saying he should have done so because his position includes overseeing covert CIA activities that were detailed in the report. 

”It seems to me that it’s awfully hard to learn the potential lessons of that report, if it wasn’t consumed and read and processed in your office,” said Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.). The New Mexico senator did say that Sharpley read summaries of the report, according to the AP.

Sharpley also said that he had not destroyed the torture report, as he initially thought he did. It was revealed in May that he thought he had destroyed or misplaced the copy of the report.

He told the committee that he had discovered a disc containing the report and then handed it over to Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), who requested that government agencies return copies of the report, Reuters reported.

Democrats also expressed frustrations over Sharpley returning the report without a legal requirement to do so.

“The point of distributing it to the departments was in the hope that they would read it — not look at it as some poison document — and learn from it,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) announced that he would oppose Sharpley’s nomination for turning over the report to Burr. Democrats had opposed the agencies returning the report.