Political Quotes

“I appreciate my colleague's assessment on that issue. He knows that it was very troubling that in 2012 and in 2013, we just weren't able to get straight answers to this question of collecting data on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans. My colleague will recall that the former NSA Director said that--he had been to a conference--and that he was not involved in collecting ``dossiers'' on millions of Americans. Having been on the committee at that point for over a dozen years, I said: Gee, I am not exactly sure what a ``dossier'' means in that context. So we began to ask questions, both public ones, to the extent we could, and private ones, about exactly what that meant, and we couldn't get answers to those questions. We just couldn't get answers. The Intelligence Committee traditionally doesn't have many open hearings. By my calculus, we probably get to ask questions in an open hearing for maybe 20 minutes, maximum, a year. So after months and months of trying to find out exactly what was meant, we felt it was important to ask the Director of National Intelligence exactly what was meant by these ``dossiers'' and government collecting data and the like. So at our open hearing, I said: I am going to have to ask the Director of National Intelligence about this. And because I have long felt that it was important not to try to trick people or ambush them or anything of the sort, we sent the question in advance to the head of national intelligence.…”