Rand Paul Demands to Know: Did Obama Admin Spy on Lawmakers?

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) requested Friday that White House and intelligence committees in Congress find out whether the Obama administration spied on him and other lawmakers.

“This inquiry goes beyond just myself and my office,” Paul said in a press release. “The American people need to know if their elected representatives in the legislative branch have been swept up in executive branch surveillance.”

“We’re deeply concerned at the lack of controls, and the volume of Americans who are effectively being spied on.”

The senator had tweeted early Friday morning:

“I have formally requested from the WH and the Intel Committees info on whether I was surveilled by the Obama admin and or the intel community!”

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The senator’s tweet followed an explosive May 4 report on the news website Circa that in 2016, the Obama administration requested intelligence information on “thousands” of Americans, and distributed that information — including transcripts of phone calls, emails, and other electronic communication — to hundreds of people in the government with names not redacted.

Circa’s report, entitled “President Obama’s team sought NSA intel on thousands of Americans during the 2016 election” was based on the annual report on transparency released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence on May 2.

The DNI report, says Circa, “provides the clearest evidence to date of how information accidentally collected by the NSA overseas about Americans was subsequently searched and disseminated after President Obama loosened privacy protections to make such sharing easier in 2011 in the name of national security.”

The report shows that government officials, working in the Obama administration, conducted more than 30,000 searches in 2016, for information about Americans in communications that had been intercepted by the National Security Agency, and searched the contents of phone calls and emails of 5,288 Americans. It also showed that more than 3,000 intelligence reports showing names, email addresses, and phone numbers were distributed across the government.

The NSA is charged with spying on foreigners, not Americans, but by using a broad definition of “targets” in information collected under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, the agency can claim it is not targeting American citizens, and collecting their information (listening in on their phone calls and reading their emails) “not wittingly” — incidentally, even though not exactly accidentally.

“The NSA has a twisted, and incredibly permissive, interpretation of targeting that includes communications about a target, even if the communicating parties are completely innocent,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation wrote in an article in 2014.

The information collected under Section 702 is collected without a warrant.

Paul’s office sent LifeZette and others a letter dated April 10 that the senator sent to President Donald Trump.

It starts: “Dear President Trump: An anonymous source recently alleged to me that my name, as well as the names of other members of Congress, were unmasked, queried, or both, in intercepts during the previous administration.”

In the letter, Sen. Paul goes on to ask the president to launch an investigation:

“In light of the revelations that the names of persons associated with the Trump campaign were unmasked, I believe the allegations that myself and other elected members of the legislative branch may have also been unmasked or caught in intelligence gathering warrants investigation. I ask that your administration promptly investigate whether my name or the names of other members of Congress, or individuals from our staffs or campaigns, were included in queries or searches of databases of the intelligence community, or if their identities were unmasked in any intelligence reports or products.”

Paul’s office did not respond when asked whether the senator received a reply to this letter, but indicated that the senator would be sending another similar letter on Friday.

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform from 2011 to 2015, also spoke out Friday, saying, on Capitol Hill: “We’re deeply concerned at the lack of controls, and the volume of Americans who are effectively being spied on…I think Americans, through their Congress, are going to have to tighten up the rules in a way that codifies, for all time, that Americans are not to be spied on,” said Issa.

The more than 30,000 searches for information on Americans in 2016 represents a 27 percent increase over 2015, and triple the number of searches in 2013, the first year the data were kept.