Key House and Senate Committees, as well as individual lawmakers, want to know why they were caught flat-footed by media reports of incidents in Cuba late last year that left a group of U.S. diplomats ill and reportedly suffering from hearing loss attributed to covert sonic devices.
The members have requested a classified State Department briefing, and one is scheduled for Monday for committee staffers only because members of Congress are on their August recess, according to a Congressional aide.
The lawmakers want to know why the Trump administration has waited so long to publicly say anything about the incidents in Cuba, which the State Department has acknowledged first began at the end of last year, and why the Obama administration also remained silent about it. Trump in late May expelled two Cuban diplomats from the Cuban embassy in Washington in response to the incidents against the U.S. diplomats in Havana.
“The real question is what the Obama administration knew and why they didn’t do anything about it,” a congressional aide told the Washington Free Beacon.
Read more at the Free Beacon.
