Dianne Feinstein’s legacy will be defined by these moments

The CIA report

The assault weapons bill set Feinstein against the NRA. Her quest to uncover intelligence abuses spurred an extraordinarily contentious fight with a less predictable foe: a Democratic administration.

As chair of the powerful Intelligence Committee, Feinstein was determined to examine the Central Intelligence Agency’s program of detention and interrogation after the Sept. 11 attacks. She pursued the investigation during President Barack Obama’s administration, clashing bitterly with a fellow Democrat over reckoning with America’s wartime conduct. The result: The public can read the bulk of a 700-plus page executive summary cataloguing how the CIA’s torture and detention of terrorism suspects did not produce valuable intelligence and was more brutal than the agency had publicly acknowledged.

“The major lesson of this report is that regardless of the pressures and the need to act, the Intelligence Community’s actions must always reflect who we are as a nation, and adhere to our laws and standards,” Feinstein wrote in a foreword. Instead, CIA personnel, aided by two outside contractors, decided to initiate a program of indefinite secret detention and the use of brutal interrogation techniques in violation of U.S. law, treaty obligations, and our values.”

Initially, CIA director (and fellow Californian) Leon Panetta worked with Feinstein and her staffers by sharing a tranche of documents that Senate staffers pored over inside a secure facility in northern Virginia. After three years of work, they sent a damning report to the White House.

“I really felt that Senator Feinstein, as chair of the Intelligence oversight committee, understood the responsibility to not only determine what happened but also to determine the lessons from that period in time,” Panetta said in an interview.

That collaborative spirit evaporated by the time John Brennan became CIA director in 2013. Brennan disputed the report’s conclusions, contradicting an internal agency summary and delaying publication. A larger conflict erupted over access: Brennan’s counsel filed a report with the Department of Justice alleging Senate staffers had accessed CIA documents without authorization; lawmakers accused the CIA of tapping into Senate staff computers.

It came to a head in March of 2014. Feinstein delivered a Senate floor speech describing how she learned “chilling” and “horrible” details of an “un-American, brutal program of detention and interrogation” that entailed “significant CIA wrongdoing.” She demanded the CIA apologize for breaching the computers Senate staff were using, which Brennan ultimately did after an inspector general’s report vindicated Feinstein.

In the ensuing months, Feinstein would negotiate the fine points of redactions with White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough, who flew to San Francisco to meet with her. She faced blowback until the very end. Just days before the committee published its executive report, Secretary of State John Kerry lobbied Feinstein to hold off. She did not. Now the report is an indelible part of her record and a primary document of the country’s history.

“I think it was Dianne’s hope that, if she persisted and she presented what happened, that although it would be difficult, although it would offend a lot of people in the process, that nevertheless she would serve the national interest,” Panetta said. “She knew what needed to be done, and she was experienced enough to know how the bureaucracy can be a barrier to finding the truth.”