Congress won't reauthorize a major foreign monitoring program without more information on "unmasking" American citizens caught on surveillance, according to South Carolina GOP Rep. Trey Gowdy.
"That is a privilege to be able to request that a U.S. person's name be unmasked," Rep. Gowdy said on Fox News' "America's Newsroom" Wednesday. "I want to know who's making the request [and] what is the evidentiary basis of that request? And if it's late in your tenure — like the day before you leave office — that should send off alarms and sirens in your head as to why that person did it."
Last month, President Donald Trump accused former national security adviser Susan Rice of improperly having American citizens unmasked in an attempt to implicate his campaign in reports of Russian election interference.
"I think the Susan Rice thing is a massive story. I think it's a massive, massive story. All over the world," Trump told The New York Times in an April interview.
"The Russia story is a total hoax," he added. "There has been absolutely nothing coming out of that. But what, you know, what various things led into it was the story that we're talking about, the Susan Rice. What's happened is terrible. I've never seen people so indignant, including many Democrats who are friends of mine. I've never seen them acting this way. Because that's really an affront on them, you know, they are talking about civil liberties. It's such an affront, what took place."
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