Hume: Rand’s NSA Comments on NSA ‘Will Damage Him’ If Terrorists Strike U.S.
SEN. RAND PAUL (R-KY), 2016 PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: I would as president immediately stop the bulk collection of records. I think it’s unconstitutional.
SEN MARCO RUBIO (R-FL), 2016 PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: One day I hope that I’m wrong, but one day there will be an attack that’s successful. And the first question out of everyone’s mouth is going to be, why didn’t we know about it? And the answer better not be because this Congress failed to authorize a program that might have helped us know about it.
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WALLACE: Two Republican senators and presidential candidates, Rand Paul and Marco Rubio, sharply disagreeing over this week’s court ruling that the NSA’s bulk data collection program is illegal. And we are back now with the panel. We got a lot of briefings here in Washington. But Brit, as I mentioned with Chairman McCaul, I thought the briefing this week from Jim Comey the FBI director, was about as alarming as anything I’ve heard recently. Hundreds, maybe thousands of these homegrown terrorists all around the country being sent to encrypted websites that the FBI can’t penetrate.
HUME: In response to ISIS.
WALLACE: Yeah. Right. Pretty scary.
HUME: Well, think about this for a minute, Chris. One of the premises of the administration’s approach to ISIS has been that they don’t really pose a threat to the U.S. Homeland. And remember back in the early days of the Bush administration’s efforts post-9/11, the idea was we would send forces and do whatever else it took so we could fight them over there instead of having to fight them here. Well, now, this changes that. This changes that equation to back to where it once was. If we have a spate of terrorists, successful terrorist attacks by homegrown terrorists inspired by ISIS, I think the administration’s strategy on this goes out the window. Rand Paul’s comments, I think, will damage him and we’re back to a whole different way of looking at this terrorist threat. That’s what this, it seems to me ...
WALLACE: We have to fight them here as well as over there.
HUME: Well, maybe we have to take them out over there so they’re not over there to inspire them here by remote-control through social media. That’s what’s so frightening about it.
