Monday on Rush Limbaugh’s nationally syndicated radio show, Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC), a member of the House Intelligence Committee, told fill-in host Ken Matthews that one of the difficulties his committee is facing in investigating potential improper unmasking of U.S. citizens was the lack of documents the Trump administration was willing to provide the committee.
According to Gowdy, without a proper investigation, Congress will be unable to fulfill a promise to safeguard the American people’s privacy, and without that ability, he predicted Congress would not reauthorize some surveillance programs.
“There’s 16 entities that are a part of our intelligence community globally,” Gowdy said. “And there are different folks that have the authority to request that a U.S. person’s name be unmasked. So what we want to do on House Intel is find out who made the request for unmasking, was there a bonafide intelligence reason for doing so. But we need the documents. And you know, curiously and frustratingly we’re trying to get some of the documents from the Trump administration, not the Obama administration because we’re in control now. So we should not have difficulty finding out hypothetically how many requests for unmasking did former U.N. ambassador Samantha Power make? That’s a question for which a discrete finite answer exists, and then we can go and determine whether or not there was a legitimate national security basis for that request to unmask.”
“It is important, number one, because we promised the American people we were going to safeguard their privacy in exchange for these surveillance programs,” he continued. “They’re up for reauthorization. I can tell you that every law enforcement official that I have asked, from Jeh Johnson to Jim Comey to Mike Rogers, describes these programs as critical, vital and indispensable to our national security. But they’re going to go away if this administration does not provide us the documents so we can safeguard the process. I’m tired of the leaks. I’m tired of weaponizing intelligence and it’s going to stop unless they give us the documents we need.”
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor
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