Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) said Tuesday that he doesn’t have much patience for lawmakers who have claimed they weren’t briefed on the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs, contending that those elected officials need only look in a mirror if they want someone to blame.
“For senators to complain that ‘I didn’t know this was happening,’ we’ve had many, many meetings that have been both classified and unclassified that members have been invited to,” Reid said during a briefing with reporters, as noted Tuesday by TPM.
He added: “If they don’t come and take advantage of this, I can’t say enough to say they shouldn’t come and say ‘I wasn’t aware of this,’ because they’ve had every opportunity to be aware of these programs.”
Following the reports of the classified NSA programs, Capitol Hill has seemingly been divided between lawmakers who say they were blindsided by the revelations and those who dismissed the details as old news. Sen. John Thune (R-SD) said Monday that “most members of Congress” likely didn’t know the breadth of the programs, while Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) said last week that the NSA surveillance “has been going on for seven years.”
This post has been updated.
