Two top Republican senators have asked for all the surveillance warrants the FBI requested from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) Court as part of the Bureau's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, including possible collusion with the campaign of Donald Trump.

In seeking the warrants, Senate Judiciary Committee chair Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Crime and Terrorist Subcommittee chair Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) have cited stories by the BBC, as well as CNN (which President Trump continues to brand as "fake news").

The two networks have reported that the Justice Department had asked the court for authority to monitor members of the Trump presidential campaign, but the court denied the request, advising the FBI to narrow its focus.

Grassley and Graham said, based on the reports, they want copies of both classified and non-classified requests.

Both Congress and the FBI are investigating Russia’s meddling in the presidential election and whether the Trump campaign colluded in that effort. The president has said any suggestion of that is fake news served up by media “enemies” in service of his Democratic opponents, who he says are trying to undermine his presidency.

Former FBI director James Comey said in his testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee that many news stories about the investigation into Russian interference into the 2016 presidential election have been dead wrong.

Comey was testifying on private conversations he had with President Donald Trump before being fired and the FBI's Russian investigation.

Comey was asked by Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) whether there had been news accounts about "the Russian investigation, about collusion, about this whole event or accusations" that "stunned" him with how wrong they had gotten the facts.

Comey answered yes almost immediately. "There have been many, many stories purportedly based on classified information about lots of stuff, but especially about Russia, that were just dead wrong," Comey said.

One of the more fascinating ratings trends developing thus far in 2017 has been the strong, post-presidential election performance of cable news networks.

Not surprisingly, ratings for Fox News Channel, CNN, CNBC and MSNBC trended up in 2016 during a year that featured a particularly intense and heavy news-driven presidential campaign. Adult viewers spent more than 73.5 billion minutes consuming news in an average week last year, an 18% increase from the prior year, according to Nielsen’s Total Audience Report for fourth quarter 2016.

Most of the increases were generated by the national cable news networks. Viewers consumed 27.1 billion minutes of news from those channels during the year, compared to 18.8 billion in 2015, according to the report. By comparison, national broadcast TV news drew 14.3 billion minutes of news consumption in 2016, while local broadcast TV news generated 15.1 billion minutes.

The increases were solid across all age demos, including the elusive millennial audience. In fact, millennial viewers spent more time on a weekly basis in 2016 getting their news from national cable news channels than from any other source, with the exception of local radio, according to Nielsen. Ethnic groups also preferred to get their news fix from national cable news outlets compared to any other source, according to the report.

Overall, viewers spent more than six hours per week consuming cable news in 2016, up from more than four hours a week during the year of the 2012 campaign, according to Nielsen.

Once the election was over, most industry observers believed that cable news network viewership would return to traditional levels. Yet the strength of cable news network ratings has continued after the election and into President Donald Trump’s first 100 days.

Viewer fixation on cable news spilled into the first month of 2017 through Trump’s inauguration and the official transfer of power. Adult viewers averaged more than two hours per week watching national cable news in January, which was 20% higher than in January 2016, according to Nielsen.

Well into the first quarter of 2017, the appeal of cable news has yet to abate. Fox News was easily the most watched cable network in primetime and on a total day basis during the quarter, with MSNBC and CNN finishing among the top 15 most watched networks in primetime during the period, as the health-care law battle, investigations over alleged Trump administration Russian ties and wiretapping charges dominated coverage.

It’s arguable whether the cable news genre can continue its torrid ratings pace for the rest of 2017. But if the first quarter is any indication, it’s certainly possible that cable news networks could remarkably match or surpass their 2016 election ratings tallies.

PHOTO:Reports on the Trump administration's first 100 days -- such as CNN's coverage of the $21.6 million the president's golf trips to his Mara Lago Resort have cost taxpayers in the first 80 days vs. the $97 million President Obama's travel cost over his two terms -- are keeping cable news network ratings up.

Senate Intelligence Committee ranking member Mark Warner (D-Va.) cited the media "echo" chamber at the first day of a week-long committee hearing Thursday (March 30) on Russia's attempts to influence the presidential election.

"Russia continually sought to diminish and undermine our trust in the American media by blurring our faith in what is true and what is not," he said in his opening statement. "Russian propaganda outlets like RT and Sputnik successfully produced and peddled disinformation to American audiences in pursuit of Moscow’s preferred outcome," he said.

But Warner suggested Russia had help in this country as well.

"The Russians employed thousands of Internet trolls and botnets to push out disinformation and fake news at high volume, focusing this material onto your Twitter and Facebook feeds and flooding our social media with misinformation," he said. "[T]his fake news and disinformation was then hyped by the American media echo chamber and our own social media networks to reach – and potentially influence – millions of Americans."

And as to President Donald Trump's tweets about Russian influence investigations being 'fake news," Warner had a response, though he did not make it personal: "This is not innuendo or a false allegation. This is not fake news. This is what actually happened to us."

The Senate Intelligence Committee is taking the lead after a House Intelligence Committee inquiry into Russian interference was sidelined by the chairman of that committee, Rep. Devin Nunes.

"This investigation is NOT about whether you have a “D” or an “R” next to your name. It is NOT about re-litigating last fall’s election.  It is about clearly understanding and responding to a very real threat," said Warner.

Committee chair Richard Burr (R-N.C.) said the role of Russia in the 2016 elections was a "critical intelligence question." Most of the committee's investigation will not be in public, but said it was crucial to take the "rare step" of publicly discussing the investigation. He said there would be more open hearings. He said "malign actors are using old techniques and new platforms to undermine our democratic institutions."

The hearing was to essentially provide a baseline understanding of Russian disinformation campaigns and the role of cyber efforts, including social media and other online activities. He said the takeaway from the hearing was that we are all targets of active Russian efforts. "The public deserves to hear the truth about possible Russian involvement in our elections," he said. “We’re going to get to the bottom of this, and do it right,” said Warner.

Clinton Watts, who was testifying as a senior fellow at the George Washington Center for Cyber & Homeland Security, put what he said was a cyber imbalance between Russia and the U.s. this way: "[Russia] has the best hackers that are out there...We, on the other hand, worry a lot about who we are going to bring into the cyber field because they might have smoked weed one day or they can't pass a security clearance."

Asked by Burr what the takeaway for U.S. media outlets was from that Russian hacking supremacy in terms of disniformation, Watts said: "They [the media] have to improve their editorial processes, and they also have to take a step back from the 'I gotta get it out first' competitive environment."

He said part of the reason the Russian system of disinformation works is that with every outlet racing to get the story out first--in an age when stories can be turned around and posted in minutes--"they put themselves at risk to fall for these sorts of schemes.

He said until that improves, or until "they collectively have some sort of standard that the public or the media holds to itself, we're going to keep seeing them fall for these campaigns," and not just from Russia. "The playbook has been thrown out there, he said, and many other nations are going to pick it up.