What Did Congress Really Know About NSA Tracking?
If you're a member of Congress and you didn't know about the National Security Agency's phone records program before it was disclosed last week, President Obama has this to say to you: Where have you been?
"When it comes to telephone calls, every member of Congress has been briefed on this program," Obama said to reporters last Friday.
The director of national intelligence, James Clapper, chimed in later: "We provided detailed briefings and papers on this to explain the law, to explain the process it was governing," he said on NBC News last Saturday.
And then Monday on Fox News, Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., who's on the House Intelligence Committee, told his colleagues to stop whining: "You know, these members of Congress who said they didn't know about it — they could have gotten a briefing whenever they wanted to."
OK, so then when exactly was Congress "briefed" on these surveillance programs?
Ask the White House, and it'll shoot back an email with two tidy lists. One list shows 22 briefings by date over the past 14 months on the law governing the email monitoring program. The other list shows 13 separate briefings since 2009 on the law governing the collection of phone records. Most of these classified briefings were to members of the Intelligence and Judiciary committees, but some were general sessions for the House and Senate.
Still, lawmakers say getting "briefed" doesn't mean knowing what's actually going on.
"It's playing with words. What does 'brief' mean?" asks Democratic Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia.
Rockefeller, who is on the Senate Intelligence Committee, says he never feels adequately briefed. He remembers his days on the committee during the previous administration.
"I would go up there to the White House and get briefed, and come back knowing nothing," he says.
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