Oklahoma Republican Tom Coburn, a ranking member of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, said Sunday that Edward Snowden’s revelations about the monitoring of phone calls in the United States "has been blown out of proportion."
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"We don't listen to anybody's phone calls," Coburn said on NBC's "Meet the Press." "We don't go and monitor the phone calls until we have a connection with a terrorist. It’s a whole different story than what has been blown out of proportion."
An admitted critic of big government, Coburn said oversight of the National Security Administration is one of the most of any program in the federal government, is well-run and operates within the constitutional framework of its guidelines.
"In fact, if we could talk about everything, which we can’t…, Americans would be pretty well satisfied,” he said. "Our military has done a great job running this program within the confines of this program as it was set out in Congress."
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