Shakes here...
I was emailed by a reader who wrote: “About an hour ago on Fox News, some ‘media analyst' claimed ‘the Senators who are up in arms' about this program were actually briefed about the program before it started. Have you heard anything similar to this and do you know if anyone, especially US Senators, were actually briefed on this program either before it started or while it was ongoing over the past three years?”
Well, yes—I've heard something similar. The WaPo article to which Ezra linked below includes, in part, reaction from former senator and Senate intelligence committee chair Bob Graham (D-Fla.), who asserts that he recalls no discussion about
expanding [NSA eavesdropping] to include conversations of U.S. citizens or conversations that originated or ended in the United States" -- and no mention of the president's intent to bypass the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
"I came out of the room with the full sense that we were dealing with a change in technology but not policy," Graham said…
Graham said the latest disclosures suggest that the president decided to go "beyond foreign communications to using this as a pretext for listening to U.S. citizens' communications. There was no discussion of anything like that in the meeting with Cheney."
