We now know that Vice President Joe Biden and dozens of other Obama administration officials requested the unmasking of former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn’s private phone conversation without a constitutional warrant. Biden’s abuse of government power to go after a political rival is more than a little disturbing.
This scandal reaching, perhaps, all the way to President Obama himself, is why innocent Americans wonder just how much their own government has been spying on them and vacuuming up their most sensitive information.
Despite Edward Snowden’s devastating revelations, Congress has largely abdicated its responsibility to protect the Bill of Rights, and small tweaks to the system have not stopped abuse or waste of vital resources that could have been spent actually protecting our country. Yet Congress has patted itself on the back even as it steamrolled meaningful debate on one of the biggest issues of our time.
RAND PAUL: FLYNN UNMASKING WAS 'DEVASTATING ABUSE OF POWER' BY BIDEN, OBAMA OFFICIALS
This week, the U.S. Senate will take up the U.S. House-passed government surveillance bill extending certain expired Patriot Act powers. Once again, the bill plays with reform but falls far short of bringing real change to a system that currently relies on secret courts and the hope that the government will police itself.
So I will offer an amendment to protect all Americans and help rebuild the trust our institutions have shattered over the years.
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My amendment would empower the government to conduct necessary surveillance on non-Americans and our enemies, but it would force federal officials who want to surveil an American to get a warrant from a regular court as established by our Constitution instead of the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC).
It would also protect Americans’ privacy and restore due process by preventing the government from introducing into evidence any information it gathered from surveilling an American without a warrant. Americans would, however, be allowed to use evidence collected this way to defend themselves.
My amendment would also make it illegal to use this secret, foreign court to investigate any political speech or campaign.
The alarm about abuses of our system has only grown as we have learned about the Obama administration’s spying on Donald Trump as he ran for office and then transitioned into the presidency. They used the FISA court, which meets in secret and was intended for use against foreigners.
Late last year, Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz made headlines when his office released a report that, among other findings, “identified at least 17 significant errors or omissions” in four applications the FBI made to the FISC to spy on former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.
The system as constructed lends itself too easily to mistakes and abuse that we discover far too late, and this is too important an issue for only cosmetic changes.
Not long after, we learned the Department of Justice stated that in two of the applications, “‘if not earlier, there was insufficient predication to establish probable cause to believe that Page was acting as an agent of a foreign power.’”
And, for some reason, the fact that a sitting president spied on an incoming national security adviser’s conversation continues to be regarded as just a footnote in the controversy over the FBI’s egregious treatment of Lt. Gen. Flynn.
As set up right now, and as would still be the case under the House bill, our secretive system leaves the door wide open for abuses that are only revealed long after the damage is done.
The Carter Page story led DOJ IG Horowitz to dig further, and he uncovered more shocking information concerning 29 other applications “relating to U.S. persons,” with the IG finding “apparent errors or inadequately supported facts in all of the 25 applications we reviewed.”
The FBI couldn’t find what is supposed to be required documents for the other four applications that back up the claims made, with it not even sure those documents “ever existed” for three of those four, according to the IG.
Do not misunderstand me here. Our government is filled with lots of good, hardworking men and women, and the FBI is making efforts to help prevent future problems. But the system as constructed lends itself too easily to mistakes and abuse that we discover far too late, and this is too important an issue for only cosmetic changes.
We need substantive reform and not window dressing.
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I don’t believe tinkering around the edges with process reforms can make FISA constitutional. FISA employs a less-than-constitutional standard. Instead of the Fourth Amendment’s requirement of probable cause that a crime was committed or being committed, the FISA standard allows for investigations if there is probable cause that an individual is working for a foreign government.
I believe the only way to fix FISA is to exempt Americans from this court that was intended to investigate foreigners.
I, for one, am tired of hearing after-the-fact outrage, only to see it vanish when it comes time to vote.
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The Patriot Act debate cuts right to the heart of what we stand for as a nation. It forces us to ask whether we will stick by our core, founding principles when they are challenged or fold in the face of those threats and change who we are supposed to be.
The most patriotic action we could take this week would be to reaffirm the Bill of Rights, rescue due process from bureaucratic overreach and secrecy, and make it clear we can keep our people safe without treating innocent Americans like criminals.