call database scandal appeared in the media. Lawsuits The Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a related suit against AT&T on January 31, 2006, alleging that the firm had given NSA access to its database, a charge reiterated in the USA Today article. Verizon and BellSouth have both claimed they were never contacted by the NSA, nor did they provide any information to the agency, though US codes of law permit companies to lie about their activities when the President believes that telling the truth would compromise national security. On June 6, 2013, in the wake of well-publicized leaks of top secret documents by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, conservative public interest lawyer and Judicial Watch founder Larry Klayman filed a lawsuit (Klayman v. Obama) challenging the constitutionality and statutory authorization of the government's wholesale collection of phone record metadata. On June 10, the American Civil Liberties Union and Yale Law School's Media Freedom and Information Clinic filed a motion with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) asking for the secret FISC opinions on the Patriot Act to be made public in the light of the Guardian'''s publication of a leaked FISC court order about the collection of Verizon call records metadata. On June 11, the ACLU filed a lawsuit (ACLU v. Clapper) against Director of National Intelligence James Clapper challenging the legality of the NSA's telephony metadata collection program. Once the judge in each case had issued rulings seemingly at odds with one another, Gary Schmitt (former staff director of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence) wrote in The Weekly Standard, "The two decisions have generated public confusion over the constitutionality of the NSA's data collection program—a kind of judicial 'he-said, she-said' standoff." The ACLU contested the decision in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. In 2015, the appeals court ruled that Section 215 of the Patriot Act did not authorize the bulk collection of metadata, which judge Gerard E. Lynch called a "staggering" amount of information. In November 2014, an appeals court in Washington heard arguments in the case Klayman v. Obama. During the hearings, Justice Department attorney H. Thomas Byron defended the NSA's collection of phone records and stated that "the government doesn't and never has acquired all or nearly all of the telephone call data records." Claims New Jersey Spurred by the public disclosure of the NSA call database, a lawsuit was filed against Verizon on May 12,