Americans Stand With Rand on wanting privacy from federal snooping
— and lawmakers and politicians who support the Patriot Act and its bulk collection of phone metadata are simply "out of step" with voters at home, according to Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul.
In an unapologetic interview with
Newsmax TV "Hard Line" host Ed Berliner, the Libertarian-leaning Republican candidate for president
— pilloried by some in his own party for working against the law's re-authorization — insisted federal investigators can get "much more" information on terrorists with traditional warrants "than you can get from superficially looking at metadata."
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"I've traveled a lot in the last year, but really in the last week, I've been in five different states and we have people turning out by the hundreds who agree with me that they don't want the president looking at their phone records," said Paul, whose new book is titled,
"Taking a Stand: Moving Beyond Partisan Politics to Unite America."
"They don't trust the president. This is the president who used the IRS against tea party groups, who has used the IRS against religious groups, who has used the IRS to invade our religious liberty. And I frankly don't trust the president with our phone records."
Fellow GOP White House contenders like Jeb Bush
have criticized Paul for his anti-Patriot Act stance, saying it puts America's security at risk.
Paul counters those opinions are "outside the mainstream."
"In D.C., a lot of the politicians are out of step," he charged. "This is why we ought to have term limits frankly
— because they stay so long that they forget about what people think at home."
"People inside the Beltway, they need to leave sometimes; they need to leave Washington and visit America," he added. "Because … if you ask Americans, under the age of 40, 'do you think the government has gone too far in collecting your records,' 83 percent of young people think the government has gone too far in collecting our records indiscriminately."
He added "well over" 50 percent of Republicans also believe that's the case. But popular or not, Paul said, it's "about the Bill of Rights and the Constitution and the oath I take to defend the Constitution."
"I would do it even if it were unpopular, but I frankly think they have been in Washington so long they have no idea what the rest of America is like," he said.
Paul's unflinching defense of his anti-Patriot Act stance comes as the Senate failed to act before a Sunday deadline to extend the Patriot Act, curtailing authority for the National Security Agency to track suspected terrorists.
No solution was likely before Tuesday at the earliest.
The lapse in authority affects not only the NSA's ability to collect mass phone records. It also means at least a temporary end to the FBI's authority to gather business records in terrorism and espionage investigations, and to more easily eavesdrop on a suspect who is discarding cellphones to avoid surveillance.
Paul, meanwhile, walked back his accusation that foes "secretly want" a terror attack so they could blame it on him.
"In the heat of the battle sometimes hyperbole can get the better of us and that's an example of it," he said. "What I was trying to say and could be better said is that sometimes people try to use fear to get us to give up our liberty in exchange for a false sense of security, but it was a mistake for me to try to question others' motives. … Hyperbole got its way with me."
Paul stood firm, however, on his defense of the Fourth Amendment.
"John Adams said that the spark that led to our war for independence was basically the defense against generalized warrants and that's where the Fourth Amendment came about," he explained. "We were upset that the British soldiers were writing their own warrants and that they were just coming into American houses without a warrant that had their name on it."
He added that
Justice Louis Brandeis in 1928 famously described the "right to be let alone" as "the most comprehensive of rights, and the right most valued by civilized men."
"A lot of Americans still agree with that," Paul said.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.