In a cryptic statement on Wednesday, House Intelligence Chairman Mike Turner, R-Ohio, urged President Joe Biden to declassify information “concerning a serious national security threat” without expanding on the nature of it.

A senior congressional aide told The Associated Press that it relates to to concerns about Russian anti-satellite weapons.

Turner wrote that the Intelligence Committee on Wednesday “made available to all Members of Congress information concerning a serious national security threat.”

“I am requesting that President Biden declassify all information relating to this threat so that Congress, the Administration, and our allies can openly discuss the actions necessary to respond to this threat,” he continued, without going into detail.

Turner earlier Wednesday sent an email to members of Congress saying his committee had “identified an urgent matter with regard to a destabilizing foreign military capability” that should be known to all congressional policy makers. He encouraged them to come to a SCIF, a secure area, to review the intelligence. He again provided no details.

Spectrum News has reached out to Turner’s office for further clarification.

The congressional aide said he understood that the threat relates to a space-deployed Russian anti-satellite weapon that may or may not already have been launched. Such a weapon could pose a major danger to U.S. satellites that transmit billions of bytes of data each hour.

The aide said it was not yet clear if the Russian weapon has nuclear capability, but said that is the fear.

The top Democrat and Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee said that their panel "has the intelligence in question, and has been rigorously tracking this issue from the start."

"We continue to take this matter seriously and are discussing an appropriate response with the administration," said Chairman Mark Warner, D-Va., and Vice Chairman Marco Rubio, R-Fla., said in a joint statement.

When asked about it at a briefing on Wednesday, White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said that he was “surprised” that Turner went public with the information, given that he scheduled a briefing with the four House members of the “Gang of 8” — the leaders of each party and the two top members on the House Intelligence Committee — for Thursday.

“That’s been on the books, so I am surprised that Congressman Turner came out publicly today in advance of a meeting on the books for me to go sit with him alongside our intelligence and defense professionals tomorrow,” Sullivan said. “That’s his choice to do that, all I can tell you is that I’m focused on going to see him, sit with him and the other House members of the Gang of 8 tomorrow.”

“I’m not in a position to say anything further from this podium at this time, other than to make the broad point that this administration has gone further and in more creative, more strategic ways dealt with the declassification of intelligence in the national interests of the United States than any administration in history,” Sullivan continued. “You definitely are not going to find an unwillingness to do that when it’s in our national security interest to do so.”

When pressed further, Sullivan would only say that “Americans understand that there are a range of threats and challenges in the world.”

“I am confident that President Biden is going to ensure the security of the American people going forward,” he added.

House Speaker Mike Johnson said there was no need for alarm. He said he was not at liberty to disclose the classified information. "But we just want to assure everyone steady hands are at the wheel. We’re working on it and there’s no need for alarm,” he told reporters at the Capitol.

Johnson said he sent a letter last month to the White House requesting a meeting with the president to discuss “the serious national security issue that is classified.” He said Sullivan's meeting was in response to his request.

House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, meanwhile, said in a statement that "the most urgent national security threat facing the American people right now is the possibility that Congress abandons Ukraine and allows Vladimir Putin’s Russia to win," referencing Johnson's resistance to putting the $95 billion Israel and Ukraine aid bill that the Senate passed this week on the floor for a vote.

The rapidly evolving threat in space was one of the primary reasons that the U.S. Space Force was established in 2019. A lot of that threat has to do with new capabilities that China and Russia have already developed that can interfere with critical satellite-based U.S. communications, such as GPS and the ability to quickly detect missile launches.

In recent years the U.S. has seen both China and Russia pursue new ways to jam satellites, intercept their feeds, blind them, shoot them down and even potentially grab them with a robotic arm to pull them out of their programmed orbits. One of the key missions of the Space Force is to train troops skilled in detecting and defending against those threats.

In its 2020 Defense Space Strategy, the Pentagon said China and Russia presented the greatest strategic threat in space due to their aggressive development of counterspace abilities, and their military doctrine calling for extending conflict to space.

Spectrum News' Harri Leigh and Taylor Popielarz and The Associated Press contributed to this report.