The Republican chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee is investigating whether GOP presidential contender Sen. Ted Cruz spilled top-secret NSA information during Tuesday night's GOP debate.
"I'm having my staff look at the transcripts of the debate right now," North Carolina Republican Sen. Richard Burr said,
The Hill reports.
"Any time you deal with numbers... the question is 'is that classified or not' or is there an open source reference to it."
The slip in question had to do with the amount of telephone numbers covered by the National Security Agency's
metadata monitoring program after legislative changes were made earlier this year.
"What he knows is that the old program covered 20 percent to 30 percent of phone numbers to search for terrorists," Cruz said, referring to rival Florida Sen. Marco Rubio.
"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 apparently knew the conversation was headed in a tricky direction,
Talking Points Memo notes.
"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," Rubio said.
"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."
Right after the back-and-forth, Burr's communications director suggested Cruz said too much.
But it was Politico correspondent Seung Min Kim who tweeted the reason for Burr missing the moment.
Reuters contributed to this report.
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