"They have been a campaign contributor," Specter said, "along with 50,000 other people ... I've been at this line of work for a long time, and no one has ever questioned my integrity."

In an interview with HBO scheduled to air Friday night on "Real Sports With Bryant Gumbel," Walsh dismissed Belichick's attempts to minimize the impact of the taping.

"If it was of little or no importance, I imagine they wouldn't have continued to do it, and probably not taken the chances of going down onto the field in Pittsburgh or shooting from other teams' stadiums the way we did," Walsh said.

Walsh told HBO that his superiors coached him on how to evade NFL rules limiting the number of camera operators per team to two, and that team officials instructed him on ways to avoid detection.

Walsh also talked about Belichick's claim that he misinterpreted NFL rules.

"When I was doing it, I understood what we were doing to be wrong," Walsh said. "We went to great lengths to keep from being caught. Just saying that the rules were misinterpreted isn't enough of an apology or a reasoning for what was done. ...

"Coach Belichick's explanation for having misinterpreted the rules, to me, that really didn't sound like taking responsibility for what we had done, especially considering the great lengths that we had gone through to hide what we were doing."

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AP Sports Writers Rachel Cohen in New York and Howard Ulman in Foxborough, Mass., contributed to this report.