In coverage of President Bush's January 23 speech  at Kansas State University, evening news broadcasts on ABC, CBS, and NBC uncritically reported Bush's assertion that his "briefing Congress" about his authorization of warrantless domestic wiretaps by the National Security Agency (NSA) -- in apparent violation of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) -- shows that he believed the wiretapping program was legal. Bush said: "You know, it's amazing, when people say to me, well, he was just breaking the law -- if I wanted to break the law, why was I briefing Congress?" Similarly, on CNN's American Morning, host Miles O'Brien failed to challenge a claim by Dan Bartlett, counselor to the president, that "if the president of the United States was consciously breaking the law, why would he go inform the Congress that he was doing it?"
But none of these reports noted that both Bush's and Bartlett's assertions rest on the false premise that the briefings given Congress by the White House were full and adequate. Indeed, members of Congress from both parties have disputed  the administration's claim that they were adequately briefed on the program, asserting that the information they received was incomplete. Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-WV), Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-MI), former Sen. Bob Graham (D-FL), and Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) all said that they never received written reports on the program, which are required of the White House under the National Security Act of 1947  (as amended in 2001). Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) said  the "program in fact goes far beyond the measures to target Al Qaeda about which I was briefed." The New York Times reported on December 21 that Graham complained he was not told "that the program would involve eavesdropping on American citizens." Shortly after the program was publicly disclosed, House and Senate Democrats sent a letter  stating that media accounts of the program "have gone beyond what the administration" told Congress.
A January 18 report by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service concluded  that the Bush administration's limited notification of Congress about the domestic surveillance program "appear[s] to be inconsistent with the law."
In addition, O'Brien ignored Bartlett's false assertion made on CNN that members of the House and Senate leadership of both parties had been briefed, and "everybody came to the same conclusion, that what the president was doing was legal and was necessary." As Media Matters for America has noted , of the seven Democratic lawmakers known to have been briefed on the program prior to its public disclosure , three -- even with inadequate information -- objected at the time and three more have said they weren't given adequate information about the program. Rockefeller , the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi  (D-CA) are known to have expressed concern at the time of their briefing. Harman, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, and Reid said that the program was not fully laid out for them.
Bartlett's comments were first noted by the weblog Think Progress .