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Congressional interlocutors are two intelligence oversight committees, both in the house and in the senate, so they are used to operating in a classified environment. their staffs are. so that is primarily with whom we do business. but, on a piece of legislation, say in this case the fisa amendment act, we provided detailed briefings and papers on this to explain the law, explain the process it was governing. i can't comment on whether senators or representatives were all able to avail themselves, but that material was made available and certainly if any member, whether on the intelligence com...

Out of the intel community's hand to the fbi to get a normal kind of search warrant or wiretap application that you would need to do any other kind of wiretap. everybody we have talked to has said that the nsa does not have the legal authority to do that. remember, in the bite he said i had the authority to do that. i think that's a real question. >> pete williams, kelly o'donnell and chuck todd, thank you all very, very much. senator john thune is a member of the senate republican leadership and joins me now. senator thune, what do you think should happen to edward snowden if he is charged ...

So we all look upon it, no matter what his or her motivation may have been, the damage that these revelations incur are huge. and so i hope we're able to track down whoever is doing this because it is extremely damaging -- and it affects the safety and security of this country. >>ky assume from that --ky infer that there has been a referral to track down the leak? >> absolutely. nsa has filed a crimes report on this already. is there and some people would regard this person, he or she, as a whistle-blower and hero for letting the american public know that their e-mails are being tapped into an...

Statute and has instead been collecting all americans' information, telephone records, and deciding later whether those records are relevant. so that's the concern. >> their argument is that the phone companies refuse to keep the records for more than 90 days. so if they can't force the phone companies to spend the money to store all these data, that the government has to do it so that then they have something to look back at if they see a subsequent threat. >> sure. so then the government needs to make a public case for why needs to have this conversation going so far back and it needs to pus...

Personal lives. what happens when you're gone, when this president or others in our government are gone. there can be another white house that breaks the law. there could be another dni who does really bad things. we listened during the water gate years to those tapes with the president of the united states saying firebomb the brookings institution. what do you say to the american people about the next regime who has all of these secrets? do they live forever somewhere in a computer? >> no, they don't live forever. that's a valid concern, i think. people come and go, presidents come and out, d...