Republican North Carolina Sen. Richard Burr heard through the Washington press corps grapevine that Marco Rubio thought Ted Cruz leaked classified information during Tuesday night's presidential debate. Burr didn't witness this directly though, because, as he explained, "’The Voice’ was on. It was the final episode." Priorities, you know. At any rate, he's decided he'd better get the staff on his committee—the Senate Intelligence Committee—to look into it.
"The question had been raised. Therefore I asked them to look at it and see if there was any validity to it," Burr told reporters.
Burr added: "It's not as clear as just reading what he said. We've got to search all sorts of media outlets to see if anyone had reported that number independently."
"That number" being the "nearly 100 percent" of phone numbers Cruz says can be monitored through the USA Freedom Act, which he voted for, versus the "20 percent to 30 percent" under earlier Patriot Act provisions.
There are now a couple of problems with this. First, as Marcy Wheeler points out, Burr pretty much just confirmed that the intelligence community is "targeting 'Internet phones' as well as the more limited set of call records the Section 215 phone dragnet used to incorporate, and in doing so getting closer to 100% of 'calls' (which includes texting and messaging) in the US." That's what Cruz asserted in the debate and Rubio called out. So now ISIS and whoever else we might not want to know this knows this. Thanks, Burr!
Here's the other big problem: Ted Cruz isn't on the Intelligence Committee, but Marco Rubio is and has access to much more classified information. And Rubio is, as Marcy says, a “serial leaker” of classified information, and has himself leaked basically this same stuff.
That's what Cruz gets, say Beltway media types like John Harwood, for being such an unlikable person to his colleagues. But chances are pretty good Burr has been too focused on The Voice to notice that his pal Rubio has very loose lips. Maybe somebody should clue him in on that, too.