Sen. Rand Paul slammed efforts by members of the U.S. intelligence community to evade restrictions within the Constitution in an attempt to target President Trump via former national security adviser Michael Flynn.
On Thursday, the Kentucky statesman told Fox News host Tucker Carlson that he was appalled to learn members of the intelligence community allegedly circumvented the rule of law to surveil Flynn.
“I think it’s worse than you could even imagine,” Paul said. “This is an end run on the Constitution. They had no warrant to listen to Flynn’s conversations, so what they do is they go and they record the conversation of a foreigner, of an ambassador from Russia, but they don’t really have to get a warrant. They either get a foreign surveillance warrant, which doesn’t really require Fourth Amendment, and I actually don’t care if they do or don’t on the ambassador, but they’re really doing it come around and get the American.”
Flynn was ousted as Trump’s national security adviser in January 2017 after communications between him and former Russian Ambassador to the U.S. Sergey Kislyak were released to the media. The question over who leaked those classified communications remains unanswered.
Paul stressed it is important for intelligence community members to explain their reasoning for unmasking U.S. citizens and that the decision to pursue an investigation into Flynn was an attempt to continue a then-stalled investigation into Russian collusion.
“We should not let them unmask anybody without writing down and affirming what was the national security interest that caused you to unmask this person,” added Paul. “So, you have the national security adviser, the new one, coming in, talking to the ambassador about policy. There’s no national security interest in that. Only political shenanigans because they were trying to gin up this whole conspiracy with Russia thing that really wasn’t going anywhere.”
