New York Republican Rep. Peter King accused Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul of misinforming the people and distorting information.
On this weekend’s broadcast of “Fox News Sunday,” King took issue with the Paul’s efforts to restrict domestic surveillance by the National Security Agency amid accusations the agency is collecting private data on millions of Americans.
“I totally disagree with what Sen. Rand Paul said,” King said. “That was just a grab bag of misinformation and distortion coming from him. The fact is John [Roberts], look at this — take Rand Paul’s own numbers. He says there’s billions of phone calls being collected. It’s not even true, but let’s assume he’s being right for once — billions of phone calls being collected. You juxtapose that with 2,800 violations, which were self-reported by the NSA, which are not violating anybody’s rights. You’re talking about 1,900 being foreigners, and when they came to the U.S., their foreign mobile phone wasn’t immediately transferred over the way they were supposed to be. No Americans rights were violated with that. The others were records which were kept more than five years by accident, self-reported by the NSA.”
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King argued those inconsistencies did not rise to the level of a “scandal” and that attacks on the NSA and its employees for those reasons were not justified.
“To me, a scandal is when a government agency is somehow using information to hurt people or go after them,” King continued. “Whatever mistakes were made were inadvertent. And if you have a 99.99 percent batting average, that’s better than most media people do, most politicians do. And I have a tremendous respect for Gen. [Keith] Alexander and the NSA. And this whole tone of snooping and spying that we use — I think it’s horrible. It’s a distortion, a smear and a slander of good patriotic Americans.”