One of the newly disclosed files was about Sen. Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee who is leading the fight on Capitol Hill to reign in the government's phone records collection. In a ruling to justify the program by the then-chief judge of the intelligence court, Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, she quoted a 2001 floor speech by Mr. Leahy to explain that Congress believed that phone records could be collected under U.S. laws.
Mr. Leahy has proposed ending the NSA's sweep of phone records, allowing the government to seek only records related to ongoing terror investigations.
