Rand Paul: ‘I Would Actually Keep the NSA’

On Sunday’s broadcast of NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), a candidate for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, elaborated on his views of the National Security Agency (NSA).

According Paul, he would not eliminate the NSA, but instead said he would make it focus more on those under the suspicion of committing possible terrorist acts.

“I would actually keep the NSA,” he said. “In fact, I would have the NSA target their activities more and more towards our enemies. I think if you are not spending so much time and money collecting the information of innocent Americans, maybe we could have spent more time knowing one of the Tsarnaev boys, one of the Boston bombers, had gone back to Chechnya.”

“We didn’t know that even though we had been tipped off by the Russians,” he continued. “We had communicated. We had interviewed him and still didn’t know that. Same with the recent jihadist from Phoenix that traveled to Texas and the shooting in Garland. We knew him. We had investigated him. We had put him in jail. I want to spend more time on people we have suspicion of and we have probable cause and less time on innocent Americans. It distracts us from the job of getting terrorists.”

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