The Obama administration has agreed to show two congressional panels the stated legal rationale for assassinating U.S. citizens overseas. On Thursday, the White House directed the Justice Department to release a controversial 2010 memo to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees. The memo details the administration’s legal justification for targeting the American-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who ultimately died in a U.S. drone strike in Yemen. The memo’s release follows growing calls from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle for access to the administration’s guidelines for drone strikes and other attacks targeting U.S. citizens overseas. A bipartisan Senate letter demanding the memos earlier this week had accused the White House of “practicing secret law.” It also follows this week’s leaking of a “white memo” that allows for the killing of Americans through an expansive definition of what constitutes an “imminent” threat. At a news conference in Washington, Attorney General Eric Holder was asked why he isn’t releasing the drone memos publicly after disclosing the torture memos of the Bush years.

Reporter: “You were a driving force behind releasing the Bush administration’s torture memos. Why aren’t you a force for this?”

Eric Holder: “Well, I mean, we’ll have to, you know, look at this and see how — what it is we want to do with these memos. But you have to understand that we are talking about things that are — that go into really kind of how we conduct our offensive operations against a clear and present danger to this nation.”