In the immediate aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks, a House Intelligence Committee staffer named Diane Roark was assigned to handle the committee’s oversight of the National Security Agency. Roark developed excellent contacts inside the NSA and soon discovered that in the weeks after 9/11, the agency had launched a secret, illegal program to spy on Americans.

Roark wrote a memo warning the committee’s leadership about the new domestic spying program. She was certain that the chair and ranking member would order an investigation as soon as she told them about it.

But Roark was stunned when the committee’s staff director told her to drop the matter. She was ordered not to talk to anyone, even other committee members, about what she had uncovered. What Roark didn’t know until later was that the George W. Bush White House had only briefed the “Gang of Eight” – the top House and Senate leaders, including the chair and ranking member of the House intelligence committee — about the NSA program, and those leaders were now complicit in a silent coverup of the illegal operation.

Frustrated, Roark turned in early 2002 to Richard Burr, a North Carolina Republican representative at the time and a backbench member of the Intelligence Committee who had not been briefed on the program. She quietly arranged a private meeting with Burr to tell him about it, and she brought along her NSA contacts to back her up. She was risking her job by ignoring orders to keep silent, but she hoped that Burr would be just as outraged as she was about the NSA program and help her fight back and shut it down.

Sitting in Burr’s congressional office, Roark and the others told Burr in detail what they knew about the NSA program. Burr said almost nothing in response, Roark recalled in an interview for my 2014 book, “Pay Any Price.”

He never talked to Roark about the matter again, she said, and apparently never took any other action to stop the illegal surveillance of American citizens.

Instead of protecting the constituents he served, Burr chose to protect his political career. He displayed cowardice when a courageous whistleblower sought his help. He was rewarded when he was elected to the Senate in 2004 with the full backing of the Republican Party.

Now, 18 years later, Burr has responded to another great national crisis by once again looking out for his own self-interest while ignoring the interests of the American people.