Rep. Peter King Slams Rand Paul: ‘Grab Bag of Distortion’ on NSA

New York Congressman Peter King strongly rebutted Kentucky Senator Rand Paul on Fox News Sunday, as the two continued to lock horns over whether the NSA’s expansive surveillance programs are a necessary feature of national security or an unprecedented violation of Americans’ privacy.

Paul had appeared earlier on the show and called for an external investigation of the NSA, which has been revealed to have made numerous transgressions into collecting Americans’ communications, despite their own rules against such actions.

King disagreed, arguing that the violations were few and frivolous in the large scheme of the program.

“That was just a grab bag of misinformation and distortion,” he said. “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. You juxtapose that with 2,800 violations, which were self-reported by the NSA, 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.”

“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. If you have a 99.99% batting average, that’s better than most media people do, most politicians do.”

Watch the full clip here, via Fox News:

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Image via Fox News

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