WASHINGTON, Dec. 20 – The limited oral briefings provided by the White
House to a handful of lawmakers about the domestic eavesdropping program may
not have fulfilled a legal requirement under the National Security Act that
calls for such reports to be in written form, Congressional officials from
both parties said on Tuesday.

The White House has refused to describe the timing and scope of the
briefings, except to say that there were more than a dozen. But among the
small group of current and former Congressional leaders who have attended
the high-level gatherings conducted by Vice President Dick Cheney at the
White House, several have described them as sessions in which aides were
barred and note-taking was prohibited.

All told, no more than 14 members of Congress have been briefed about the
program since it took effect in 2001, the Congressional officials said. Now
lawmakers from both parties are debating whether those members-only
briefings provided a sufficient basis for oversight of an activity that is
only now coming under intense Congressional scrutiny.

“You can’t have the administration and a select number of members alter
the law,” Senator Arlen Specter, the Pennsylvania Republican who heads the
Judiciary Committee, said this week. “It can’t be done.”

View complete article
here.

So questions are being raised as to the legality of the actual meetings in
which the administration informed members of Congress about the tapping of
phones.

The views of some of the people involved in the meetings are also of
interest. From later in the same article:

When I was briefed on it, you couldn’t help but conclude that it would
have an impact on Americans,” said Representative Peter Hoekstra, Republican
of Michigan, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.

Mr. Hoekstra said that he was first summoned to one of the sessions in
August 2004, after taking over as panel chairman, and that he had attended
two others since, with the other leaders of the House and Senate
Intelligence Committees.

But Bob Graham, a former Democratic senator from Florida who was chairman
of the Intelligence Committee, said his recollection from an initial
briefing in late 2001 or early 2002 was that there had been no specific
discussion that the program would involve eavesdropping on American
citizens.

“You don’t know what you don’t know,” Mr. Graham said, adding that he
would have objected to the program had he been fully briefed on its
dimensions.

Interesting view coming from Hoekstra. You can not tell which way it would
go. He carefully crafted his words but it still appears that he had concerns
over the program.

There is definitely enough outrage in this country to get hearings going or
members of Congress could be facing a losing battle in the polls next November.
The media is doing a great job of keeping this story alive and that is exactly
what we need right now.