On Tuesday, officials from the Office of Personnel Management, the Office of Management and Budget and Department of Homeland Security all refused to testify before the House Armed Services Committee about their handling of the massive OPM hack earlier this year.
The officials cancelled their scheduled closed-door appearance at the last minute citing issues with the briefing being transcribed and "on the record," according to The Washington Free Beacon.
The committee was seeking information relating to the wide-scale computer breach that exposed sensitive personal information of more than 22 million current and former federal employees and contractors, including names, Social Security numbers and addresses. Chinese hackers are thought to be responsible for the attack, which is considered one of the largest exfiltrations of government data in U.S. history.
"OPM, Homeland Security and OMB's last-minute refusal to appear before this committee is unacceptable," Committee Chairman Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, said in a statement, reported The Washington Examiner. "Their excuse, that the testimony would be on the record, is disturbing."
He continued: "Let me be clear; this briefing covers the largest government data breach in history. The overwhelming victims of the breach are our troops and the [Defense Department] civilians who work to support them - not to mention the force protection implications from a breach of personally-identifiable information of their family members and dependents... There is no excuse at all for being unwilling to explain on the record about how the breach happened and what we are doing to prevent another one."
The three federal agencies said in a joint statement that since May that they had already engaged in more than a dozen classified briefings and open hearings with Congress about the hacks, according to Reuters.
"Unfortunately, were unable to accommodate a last-minute change in the request today," the statement added. "We look forward to working with our partners in Congress for a briefing in the future."
Claude Chafin, spokesman for the House Armed Services Committee, said the officials cancelled about one hour before the meeting, after they learned that the hearing would be transcribed.
"The reason was, one hour before the hearing was to begin, they discovered it was to be transcribed, which is our normal practice. They did not want to appear at a briefing that would be transcribed," Chafin told the Free Beacon, explaining that the transcripts are classified and help inform lawmakers who could not attend the meetings.
"The notion that OPM wouldn't come up and brief members because they didn't want to be held accountable for what they'd say in a classified setting is remarkable," Chafin added.
Officials from the Department of Defense and members of the U.S. intelligence community testified as planned.
