During the latter days of President George W. Bush’s administration, and throughout most of President Barack Obama’s, the Republican Party re-discovered a sense of civil libertarianism that would have pleased former Sens. Robert Taft, R-Ohio, or Barry Goldwater, R-Ariz.
Spearheaded by former Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, and his son, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., the party seemed to have seen the light from its neoconservative misadventures in foreign policy abroad and invasive domestic security measures such as The USA Patriot Act.
By 2013, the National Security Agency’s PRISM controversy seemed to validate concerns that had been growing on the Right and Left alike throughout the War on Terror. Personal liberty, and particularly the Fourth Amendment, were being threatened by our growing intelligence behemoth.
The Washington Examiner‘s own Tim Carney took apart the pervasive, but inherently flawed, “nothing to hide” argument regarding government surveillance at the time of the NSA scandal. Among other things, Carney noted, “None of us scrupulously obeys the law. Technically speaking, we’re all criminals,” before citing such examples as copying CDs to violate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act or offering your underage relative a glass of wine at dinner.
Carney later added, “One threat to privacy is Congress expanding the use of these Big Brother tools. Another threat is an administration using it illegally.”
Welcome to 2017, where before President Trump had the opportunity to run afoul of the law with his own NSA surveillance apparatus, the permanent state moved swiftly, broke federal laws of its own accord and succeeded in securing the earliest resignation of a national security adviser in United States history.
Intelligence officials confirmed that now-former national security adviser, Mike Flynn did not violate the 1799 Logan Act, which bars private citizens from negotiating with foreign governments, during the presidential transition period. That said, Flynn’s admitted incomplete representation of his communications with Sergey Kislyak, the Russian Ambassador to the U.S. (causing Vice President Mike Pence to repeat misinformation in television appearances), was deemed enough of a smoking gun to sink the former lieutenant general.
While Flynn’s conduct certainly damaged his own credibility, could have jeopardized the vice president’s, and is not recommended when interacting with any superior, Bloomberg View’s Eli Lake pointed out Tuesday that, “It’s not even clear that Flynn lied.” The broader point is that Flynn, in his capacity as both a private citizen and later a government official, was monitored just as virtually all Americans are. Due to differences of both personal and politically partisan nature, however, the surveillance of Flynn was made public illegally.
“Selectively disclosing details of private conversations monitored by the FBI or NSA gives the permanent state the power to destroy reputations from the cloak of anonymity,” Lake wrote. He’s right. You need only travel to a country that’s undergone a military coup to understand just how unsettling the sabotage of Flynn really is.
For all the concerns about Russian influence in Trump’s White House, the U.S. intelligence community behaved an awful lot like Bolsheviks this week in sending Flynn out into the cold, and undermining our president in the process.
Tamer Abouras (@iamtamerabouras) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a writer and editor from Williamstown, N.J.
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