U.K. Delays Report Into Russian Meddling Until After Election
The committee’s reports have to be cleared by the prime minister’s office for publication.
(Bloomberg) -- A report into whether Russia has interfered in British elections won’t be published until after the Dec. 12 general election.
Parliament’s cross-party Intelligence and Security Committee, which has oversight of the U.K.’s secret agencies MI5, MI6 and GCHQ, has been investigating the threat posed by Russia. The committee’s reports have to be cleared by the prime minister’s office for publication, and chairman Dominic Grieve last week accused Boris Johnson of delaying its release.
“Parliament and the public ought to -- and must have -- access to this report in the light of the forthcoming election, and it is unacceptable for the prime minister to sit on it and deny them that information,” Grieve told Members of Parliament. But a government official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said there were concerns there had been leaks from the ISC.
The collapse of trust between the government and the ISC is a reflection of how Brexit has poisoned relations on issues far removed from European Union membership. Grieve was nominated to the ISC in 2015 by then-Prime Minister David Cameron. At the time, he was a Conservative MP and a former attorney general.
But Grieve was expelled from the Tory party in September for voting against Johnson, and is running as an independent in next month’s election.
He rejected the idea that his committee had been leaking. “There has been no leaking whatsoever of this report by myself, nor do I believe any member of the committee has done so,” he said. “I’ve seen nothing in print that suggests to me that the content of the report has been leaked.”
To contact the reporter on this story: Robert Hutton in London at rhutton1@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Tim Ross at tross54@bloomberg.net, Thomas Penny
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