The “Gang of Eight” in Congress is a small group of top leaders who receive the most sensitive intelligence briefings and covert action notifications that are not shared with the rest of Congress.

What “Gang of Eight” Means

  • The term is a nickname, not a formal committee created by the Constitution.
  • It refers specifically to leaders from both parties in the House and Senate, plus the chairs and ranking members of the two intelligence committees, who are briefed on highly classified programs in “extraordinary circumstances.”

Who Is In The Gang Of Eight (By Role)

In modern usage (and in recent news reports), the Gang of Eight is made up of these roles in Congress:

  • Speaker of the House
  • House Minority Leader
  • Senate Majority Leader
  • Senate Minority Leader
  • Chair of the House Intelligence Committee
  • Ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee
  • Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee
  • Ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee

The actual names change whenever party control or committee leadership changes, but the structure above stays the same.

Why They Matter

  • Presidents use the Gang of Eight when they decide that access to a covert program must be tightly limited, so only this group is fully briefed instead of the entire intelligence committees.
  • Members in this group are sworn to strict secrecy and often cannot even fully brief other members of Congress about what they are told.

Not To Be Confused With The 2013 “Gang of Eight”

The phrase “Gang of Eight” was also used for a different group in 2013: eight senators (four Democrats, four Republicans) who wrote a major bipartisan immigration reform bill, the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act (S.744).

Those immigration “Gang of Eight” senators were:

  • Michael Bennet (D‑CO)
  • Dick Durbin (D‑IL)
  • Bob Menendez (D‑NJ)
  • Chuck Schumer (D‑NY)
  • John McCain (R‑AZ)
  • Lindsey Graham (R‑SC)
  • Jeff Flake (R‑AZ)
  • Marco Rubio (R‑FL)

So, when people ask “who are the Gang of 8 in Congress,” they usually mean the intelligence leadership group described above, but sometimes online discussions are actually referring to the 2013 immigration group of eight senators.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.