Thanks to a law recently passed by Congress and signed into law, federal law enforcement are unable to access phone records of the terrorists who killed or injured dozens of people in San Bernardino this week. The Associated Press reports:
Marco Rubio, the Florida senator who is running for president, was among those who voted against the USA Freedom Act. “Just four days before the terrorist attack in California this week, the USA Freedom Act limited our access to critical information about potential threats,” said Rubio’s campaign in a statement provided to THE WEEKLY STANDARD. “Because too many in Washington have failed to grasp the nature of this enemy, we have less access to intelligence information now than we did just days ago. In the wake of Wednesday’s attack on innocent Americans doing nothing more than going about their daily lives, we must act swiftly to reverse the limitations imposed on these critical intelligence programs. Radical jihadists are trying to kill as many Americans as they can. Our law enforcement and intelligence professionals need access to this information. Failing to give them the tools they need to keep Americans safe is dangerous and irresponsible.”
The statement does not explicitly mention Rubio’s rival for the GOP nomination, but a Rubio campaign source noted to TWS that Texas senator Ted Cruz was a “champion” of the USA Freedom Act. Rubio has criticized Cruz since the ISIS-organized attack in Paris last month for the latter’s support for the law. The Cruz campaign has not yet returned a request for comment.
Other Republican presidential candidates have spoken in the days since San Bernardino about the need for more robust surveillance programs to protect against terrorist attacks. Jeb Bush, the former governor Florida, “renewed his call to expand U.S. intelligence capabilities, including restoring the metadata phone records surveillance, to defeat Islamic State terrorism,” reported the New Hampshire Union Leader.
“This is not the time to let our guard down,” Bush reportedly said in a teleconference town hall meeting Friday. “They declared war on us. We need to declare war on them.”
And at Thursday’s Republican Jewish Coalition forum in Washington, New Jersey governor Chris Christie sounded a similar tone on surveillance. “We’ve had Republicans who have stood on this stage today and said they were for a strong America, yet voted this summer in Congress to weaken America,” Christie said. “Voted to take away tools from our intelligence community that permits us to be able to connect the dots and do what President George W. Bush instructed me and the other 93 U.S. Attorneys in January of 2002 – to do everything we could under the law to make sure that not another American life was lost to a terrorist act on American soil.”
In addition to Cruz, another GOP presidential candidate, Kentucky senator Rand Paul, voted for the USA Freedom Act.
