Thursday during an appearance on Fox News Channel, Rep. Doug Collins (R-GA), formerly the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, emphasized the threats of not putting into place FISA reforms, which is being held up by congressional Democrats.

The Georgia Republican congressman, who is running for U.S. Senate, accused his Democrat colleagues of playing “games.”

“[T]hey’re wanting to play games with the FISA,” Collins said. “I mean there are certain provisions that we do need to extend, and those are things like roving wiretaps, things that we’ve been dealing with that deal with terrorists around the world so that we can keep safe. But what they don’t want to deal with is the actual FISA process and FISA court itself, which — because they don’t want to acknowledge the Horowitz report. They don’t want to acknowledge the fact that the — as the president said, this should never happen to another president. And, frankly, should never happen to an American citizen, like Carter Page.”

“Again, you get to the very roots there, and we start putting protections in this to make it do what it was supposed to do, and that’s protect us from foreign terrorists, not spying on American citizens, those are the kind of changes we need to make,” he continued. “And the Democrats are just — and blocked in the internal battle with themselves because they don’t want to acknowledge what happened.”

He went on to add that Democrats are reluctant to acknowledge the need for changes to the FISA process because it would “acknowledge” the attempted “coup” against President Donald Trump.

“Remember, their whole narrative is to discredit this president,” he said. “They do not like President Trump, and they don’t want to acknowledge the fact that there was an attempted basically coup with Comey, McCabe and Strzok and all the rest. And it happened at the FISA court. We’ve seen the Carter Page issue that has been now blown up. It was a — it was based on Democrat paid for information. It should have never happened. We could have done away with this national nightmare if they’d have actually not been this coup attempt basically from the FBI.”

Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor