Campaign Insists Ted Cruz Did Not Reveal Classified NSA Intelligence During GOP Debate

Ted Cruz is under fire – and now under investigation – over comments he made about NSA programs during the GOP debate.

Ted Cruz did not reveal classified intelligence information during the GOP debate, his campaign insists.

Tuesday night while responding to comments made by fellow conservative Republican Senator Marco Rubio, Cruz defended his vote to shut down the NSA’s metadata program.

After taking his usual potshots, this time aimed at the Florida Senator, claiming he made “knowingly false” and “Alinsky-like attacks like Barack Obama,” Cruz uttered this statement:

“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’s response was a mixture of surprise and concern.

“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.”

In response to news reports, The New Civil Rights Movement’s this morning among them, Sen. Richard Burr, the Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee is investigating Senator Cruz.

But the Cruz campaign insists he did noting wrong.

Cruz campaign spokeswoman Catherine Frazier, as the AP has reported this afternoon, “passed along news reports from the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal from 2014 that contained the 20 percent to 30 percent figures Cruz used, along with congressional testimony from an NSA official suggesting the USA Freedom Act could expand the universe of calls available to the agency to search.”

The material, Frazier noted, is “all publicly available.”

Whether or not that is the case, the figures, which Sen. Burr says are at the heart of deciding if Cruz revealed classified intelligence, might still have been classified. We won’t know until Burr’s committee completes its investigation.

Cruz himself has not spoken about the charge, nor has his campaign issued an official statement, likely in an attempt to downplay the severity of this setback. 

 

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Image: Screenshot via CNN/YouTube