Rand Paul

“ I am not for retributions on the whistleblower. I don’t want him to go to jail, and I don’t want him to lose his job. But if six people, who all work together at the National Security Council, knew each other and gamed the system, knowing that they would get these protections—they gamed the system in order to try to bring down the President—we should know about that. If they had extreme bias going into the impeachment, we should know about that. ”

“ When the institution of the bureaucracy, when the intelligence community with all the power to listen to every phone conversation you have has political bias and can game the system to go after you, that is a real worry. It is a real worry that they spied on the President.
But what if you are an average ordinary American? What if you are just a supporter of President Trump or you are a Republican or you are a conservative? Are we not concerned that secret courts could allow for warrants to listen to your phone calls, to tap into your emails, to read your text messages? ”

“ I was a critic of them invading our privacy, recording the length of our phone calls, who we talk to, and sometimes recording conversations—all of this done supposedly to go after terrorists, but Americans, by the millions, are caught up in this web.
But now, for the first time, it is not just American civil liberties that are being abused by our intelligence agencies. It is an entire Presidential campaign, and it could go either way. This is why you want to limit power. Men are not angels, and that is why we put restrictions on government. ”