The staff of Sen. Richard Burr, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, is looking into whether Ted Cruz disclosed classified information about the USA Freedom Act during Tuesday night’s debate.
The Texas senator and rival Republican Sen. Marco Rubio engaged in a heated discussion of the United States’ surveillance capabilities and foreign policies, and Cruz went into detail on the new law, which Rubio voted against.
“The USA Freedom Act expands that so now we have cell phones, now we have Internet phones, now we have the phones that terrorists are likely to use and the focus of law enforcement is on targeting the bad guys,” Cruz said. “What [Rubio] knows is that the old program covered 20 percent to 30 percent of phone numbers to search for terrorists. The new program covers nearly 100 percent. That gives us greater ability to stop acts of terrorism, and he knows that that’s the case.”
Rubio responded and said the candidates needed to be cautious about getting into details of the program.
“Let me be very careful when answering this, because I don’t think national television in front of 15 million people is the place to discuss classified information. So let me just be very clear. There is nothing that we are allowed to do under this bill that we could not do before,” Rubio said.
Becca Glover Watkins, communications director for Burr, tweeted shortly after the exchange: “Cruz shouldn’t have said that.” Burr told reporters on Wednesday that he would need to look at the numbers Cruz cited to determine if “anybody had reported that number independently.”
“It’s not as clear as just reading what he said,” Burr told reporters, according to Roll Call. “I’d be a lot more worried if in fact he was a member of the [Senate Intelligence] Committee. But, to my understanding, the subject matter was not one where any members outside of the committee had been briefed on it, though we’re open to briefing on anything. We didn’t have a record of him being over there.”
But a Democratic member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, seemed to side with Cruz over Rubio.
“Senator Rubio is mistaken when he says that the USA Freedom Act does not let the government do anything that it could not do before,” Wyden said in a statement reported by Roll Call. “Section 102 of the USA Freedom Act, which I first proposed in 2013, gave law enforcement and intelligence agencies new authorities to obtain records in an emergency and get court approval after the fact. It also ended the mass surveillance of law-abiding Americans, which violated core American rights without making our country any safer.”
Cruz campaign spokesman Rick Tyler told the Washington Examiner that he could “unequivocally” say Cruz did not say anything that had not already been reported by the media.
