An obviously flustered House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi tried to field a teenager’s blunt question about the National Security Agency — but ultimately wrapped by tossing some of blame for the recent intelligence spy scandals back on the George W. Bush administration.
During a recent meeting with a group of teens, Mrs. Pelosi was asked by Andrew Demeter, who identifies as an investigative journalist with the TeenTake YouTube channel: “Why do you support the NSA’s illegal and ubiquitous data collection?”
Mrs. Pelosi stumbled a bit in her reply: “Well, I, I do not, I have questions about the metadata collection that they were, uh, collecting, unless they had a reason to do so.”
She then pointed out that she’s been a fierce defender of privacy rights and claimed some of her biggest fights have been with the NSA director.
The teen then asked about her legislative funding of the NSA.
“Yeah, of course, I don’t think we should not fund the National Security Agency,” Mrs. Pelosi said. “Some of what they do should be subjected to scrutiny. … but they perform many other functions as well. We hold them to a high order. And I’ve had some of my biggest fights here, in the intelligence community, with the [former] director of the NSA [Michael] Hayden, when he was the director. I don’t think he was on the level with us … but from 9-11 on, the Bush administration went too far on all of these things.”
• Cheryl K. Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com.
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