The Enemies Within: Why Congress Must Vet Members Before They Touch Classified Intelligence

A 26-year-old staffer joins the House Intelligence Committee and fills out Standard Form 86. It runs well past 100 pages. She lists every foreign contact, every address for the past decade, every debt, every relative born abroad. Investigators call her college roommate and her former landlord. Months pass before she may enter the committee’s secure room. The congressman she works for walks into that same room in his first week. He signs a short oath under House Rule XXIII, clause 13, and he is in. No form, no interview, no investigator. Why does Washington investigate the employee who handles a secret while presuming the elected official who receives it is trustworthy?

The presumption is written into law. Under 50 USC 3163, the statute governing access to classified information exempts the president, the vice president, members of Congress, Supreme Court justices, and presidentially appointed judges. Congress added that exception in 1994. Roll Call described the result: members are “by tradition deemed inherently trustworthy by dint of the offices they hold.” The House at least requires its secrecy oath. The Senate requires no equivalent. A senator’s eligibility for the nation’s most sensitive intelligence follows from election and nothing else.

Consider what an election is and what it is not. Shareholders choose a corporate board, and the vote confers real authority. It does not audit the directors. A director can be legitimately elected and financially dependent on a competitor at the same time, and the shareholders will never know unless someone checks. An election answers who should represent a district. A background investigation answers a different question: whether this particular person has foreign entanglements, hidden debts, or associations that endanger sources whose lives depend on secrecy. Nothing in the first answer supplies the second.

The record of what happens without the check is long. In 1943 Representative Andrew May, chairman of the House Military Affairs Committee, told reporters after a Pacific tour that Japanese depth charges were set too shallow to kill American submarines. The Japanese adjusted. Admiral Charles Lockwood later blamed the disclosure for the loss of ten submarines and 800 men. In 1971 Senator Mike Gravel read the classified Pentagon Papers into a subcommittee record and arranged their private publication. In 1975 Representative Michael Harrington passed along CIA testimony about Chile and was cut off from classified material by the Armed Services Committee, though the ethics charges later collapsed on a procedural defect. In 1987, Senator Patrick Leahy resigned from the Intelligence Committee after showing an NBC reporter a confidential committee draft. In 1995, Representative Robert Torricelli handed the press a letter exposing a CIA asset in Guatemala, and the ethics committee let it go because the wording of the secrecy oath was ambiguous. In 2002, the Justice Department investigated Senator Richard Shelby over a leaked NSA intercept, and nothing came of it. Notice the pattern. The disclosure is documented, the member is known, and the consequence is a rebuke, a resignation, or nothing.

Then there is the case that should have ended the debate. Eric Swalwell sat on the House Intelligence Committee from 2015 until Kevin McCarthy removed him in January 2023. Years earlier, a Chinese intelligence operative, Christine Fang, had attached herself to his rise, raised money for his campaign, and placed at least one intern in his office. FBI records declassified by the White House Transparency Task Force this year show that Swalwell admitted a physical relationship with Fang and that the Bureau discovered that she was steering donations and internships, involving foreign nationals, to his campaign. The FBI closed its corruption inquiry without charges. That is exactly the point. A clearance investigation does not ask whether a crime can be proven. It asks whether a person is a risk. Any clerk with Swalwell’s background would have been denied under Guideline B of the government’s adjudicative standards, which covers foreign influence. Swalwell instead read the nation’s secrets for eight years, and the only remedy anyone could find was a Speaker’s discretionary decision to pull him off a single committee.

Robert Menendez shows the other end of the pipeline. He chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee while sending nonpublic information about US embassy personnel in Cairo, through intermediaries, to an Egyptian official. The Justice Department called that information unclassified but highly sensitive. He is serving 11 years in jail. Voters elected him three times, and each election was perfectly legitimate.

Moreover, the class of member now arriving in Washington makes the old presumption untenable. On August 4, 2026, Abdul El-Sayed won Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary. FEC records show his campaign received thousands of dollars from at least 41 donors affiliated with the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), including executive director Nihad Awad, who said after October 7, 2023, that he was “happy” about the murder, kidnapping, and rape of Israeli civilians by Hamas. El-Sayed’s father-in-law, Jukaku Tayeb, sits on the CAIR board, sits on the governing bodies of two organizations named unindicted co-conspirators in the Holy Land Foundation terror-financing trial, and was the largest individual donor to the super PAC backing El-Sayed. Texas designated CAIR and the Muslim Brotherhood as terrorist organizations last year, and the State Department designated the Brotherhood’s Egyptian, Lebanese, and Jordanian chapters in January 2026. In August, a Senate Judiciary subcommittee heard testimony that CAIR and Brotherhood-linked groups have formed a working partnership with the Democratic Socialists of America around a shared revolutionary goal.

Zohran Mamdani supplies the control group. He co-founded a chapter of terror-adjacent Students for Justice in Palestine, campaigned arm in arm with Siraj Wahhaj, whom federal prosecutors listed as an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and made Ramzi Kassem, a lawyer who represented al-Qaeda detainees in Guantanamo, his chief counsel. Nearly nine months into his term as mayor of New York, the FBI still has not granted him a security clearance. Eric Adams had his in five months; Michael Bloomberg in four. Notice what happened. The government applied the ordinary standard to an elected official, the police commissioner holds the clearance in the meantime, and the city has not fallen. A mayor is vetted before he reads terrorism intelligence about his own city. A senator from the same political tendency, with overlapping donors, will read far more than that on the afternoon he is sworn in.

Here is the proposal. Every member of the House and Senate should undergo an FBI background investigation before receiving classified information, under the same 13 adjudicative guidelines that govern every federal employee. Guideline A covers allegiance to the United States and reaches those who support or associate with organizations advocating the overthrow of the government by force. Guideline B covers foreign influence. Guideline C covers foreign preference. None of this is novel. Dwight Eisenhower’s Executive Order 10450 in 1953 barred clearances for members of organizations seeking to alter the constitutional form of government by unconstitutional means. Ties to a designated terrorist organization, to a Marxist-Leninist party, or to a foreign intelligence service should disqualify a member exactly as they would disqualify his scheduler.

Will the executive branch then control its own overseers? Not if Congress writes the rule. The FBI already performs the fieldwork on cabinet nominees and federal judges without controlling the Senate’s vote. Each chamber can adopt the requirement by rule, let the Bureau investigate, and let a bipartisan panel adjudicate, with written findings and a right of appeal. Sue Myrick proposed something similar in H. Res. 265 in October 2001. Steve Buyer narrowed it to the Intelligence Committee and Defense Appropriations in 2006. Kat Cammack has spent more than a year pushing background checks for staff and told the Washington Examiner in July, “I have presented this to leadership multiple times, and while everyone agrees that it’s a good idea, there seems to be zero urgency.”

The second half of the proposal concerns leaks. A member who gives classified material to a reporter should lose access, and the referral to the Justice Department should be mandatory rather than discretionary. The Supreme Court settled the constitutional question in Gravel v. United States in 1972. The Speech or Debate Clause protects what a senator says on the floor; it does not protect arranging the private publication of stolen secrets. Section 798 of Title 18 already criminalizes disclosure of communications intelligence. The only missing ingredient is the will to apply it to people wearing a congressional pin.

The objections are predictable. One says Article I fixes the qualifications for office and Congress may add none. Correct, and irrelevant. A clearance is not a qualification for office. A member denied access still votes, still speaks, still represents his district. He simply does not read the intercepts. Another says checks cannot guarantee loyalty. Bruce Berkowitz answered that for the Hoover Institution in 2004: “the rule in protecting secrets should be risk control, not risk exclusion.” A lock that stops most thieves is still worth installing. A third says the process would be weaponized. It could be, which is why the guidelines must be written down, the adjudicaton bipartisan, and the record public enough to shame an abuse.

We must respect the voters. Michigan may send El-Sayed to the Senate, and New York has already made Mamdani its mayor, and nobody should propose undoing either result. Yet there is a difference between a mandate to legislate and a license to read the names of American assets in Tehran, and the voters never conferred the second one because it was never theirs to confer. The old phrase for people whose loyalties run to a hostile creed was the enemy within; it has become unfashionable to say so, but the Brotherhood’s own 1991 memorandum, introduced at the Holy Land trial, describes a project to destroy Western civilization from inside, and its American friends are now funding Senate campaigns, and anyone who calls that a conspiracy theory can read the FEC filings for himself. The senator gets to serve. He does not get the secrets until the FBI says he is safe with them.

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Alexander Muse is a Fellow at the John Milton Freedom Foundation and publishes daily political analysis at amuseonx.com. Primary sources cited in this piece are linked inline; campaign finance figures are drawn from FEC filings, polling data from publicly released crosstabs, and legal claims from filed pleadings. Corrections are posted to the original URL with a dated changelog. Readers who identify errors are invited to contact the author directly. Each op-ed edited for grammar and clarity using Ai in partnership with Grammarly. Data provided in a sponsored partnership with Polymarket.