“The committee is not investigating anything said during last night’s Republican presidential debate,” Sen. Richard Burr said. | Getty Intel panel not probing Cruz's debate statements

Senate Intelligence Committee leaders said Wednesday that they were not investigating whether Ted Cruz disclosed classified information during the GOP debate Tuesday night, despite the panel chairman’s comments earlier in the day, saying his staff was looking into the matter.

“The committee is not investigating anything said during last night’s Republican presidential debate,” Sen. Richard Burr and ranking member Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said in a statement released just hours after Burr said he had asked his staff to look into whether Cruz disclosed classified information when discussing the nation’s surveillance programs.


“The question had been raised, therefore I asked [Intelligence committee staff] to look at it and see if there was any validity to it,” Burr said earlier Wednesday. “Anytime you deal with numbers, and I think it dealt with numbers, the question is, is that classified or not?”

During the Tuesday debate, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) seemed to imply that Cruz (R-Texas) disclosed classified information during a testy exchange on government surveillance powers and when Cruz was disputing Rubio’s attacks on the Texas senator’s national security credentials.

“And the reason is simple,” Cruz said. “What he knows is that the old program covered 20 percent to 30 percent of phone numbers to search for terrorists. The new program covers nearly 100 percent. That gives us greater ability to stop acts of terrorism, and he knows that that’s the case.”

Rubio then responded: “Let me be very careful when answering this, because I don’t think national television, in front of 15 million people, is the place to discuss classified information.”

A source familiar with the situation said Burr wasn’t walking anything back because there was no investigation to begin with and suggested that his off-the-cuff comments in the Capitol merely got blown out of proportion. A spokeswoman for Burr declined to offer further explanation. Burr is one of the more humorous senators in the Capitol, but he rarely jokes about intelligence matters, which senators treat with great gravity.

Rubio is a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee; Cruz is not. A Cruz spokeswoman maintained that the senator did not release classified information. The 30 percent figure had been previously disclosed in a February 2014 Washington Post article, and the spokeswoman added that the new program “contains no restrictions on which types of calls within the permissible universe can be accessed.”

Earlier Wednesday, Burr said it’s not as simple as looking at Cruz’s words and determining whether the information is classified or not.

“Is there an open source reference to it?” Burr said. “So, it’s not as clear as just reading what he said. We’ve got to search all sorts of media outlets to see if anybody had reported that number independently.”

Burr added that he would be a “lot more worried” if Cruz were a member of the Intelligence Committee.

“To my understanding, the subject matter was not one where any members outside of the committee had been briefed on it,” Burr said. “Though we’re open to briefing on anything, we didn’t have a record of him being over there.”

However, Burr said he did not watch the Republican debate Tuesday night.

“‘The Voice’ was on,” Burr said, referring to the NBC singing contest show. “It was the final episode.”

