Cheney: Congressional Leadership Said No Need for Additional NSA Authorization

On Fox News Sunday this morning, former vice president Dick Cheney went into considerable detail about how Congress examined and “in effect signed off” on the NSA’s telephone-data-monitoring program — and said they turned down the idea of more aggressive oversight. He explained, “I once asked a collective group, the big nine [congressional leaders], in the spring of ’04, in the briefing when we first briefed them and said, ‘Do you think we ought to continue the program,’ and they said absolutely yes. I said, ‘Do you think we ought to go back to Congress to get additional authorization,’ and they said absolutely not. It’ll leak.”