Former state court Judge Andrew Napolitano said on Tuesday that officials from the National Security Agency “answered questions professionally” in their testimony before Congress — “but I still think it’s bogus.”
“There was none of this as we got from Attorney General [Eric] Holder and FBI Director [Robert] Mueller,” Napolitano told Neil Cavuto on Fox News.
He was referring to comments from Army Gen. Keith Alexander, the NSA’s director, on the agency’s two surveillance programs: one that gathers U.S. phone records and another that is designed to track the use of U.S.-based Internet servers by foreigners with possible links to terrorism.
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Alexander testified to the House Intelligence Committee that the programs have foiled 50 terrorist plots worldwide, including one directed at the New York Stock Exchange.
“They can pick and choose which classified episodes they're going to reveal,” said Napolitano, a former New Jersey Superior Court judge and Fox analyst. “Of course, they’re going to pick and choose the ones that make them look good.”
In attacking Alexander’s broader testimony, Napolitano specifically cited the general’s response to a question posed by Rep. Mike Rogers of Michigan, the GOP chairman of the Intelligence Committee.
Rogers asked whether the NSA had the “ability to listen to Americans’ phone calls or read their emails under these two programs?”
Alexander responded, “No, we do not have that authority.”
Napolitano observed: “Of course, he doesn’t have the legal authority to [listen to] the phone calls. That’s not what the question asked. The question asked, ‘Does he have the practical ability to do so?’ and he couldn’t answer that because the answer is ‘yes.’ And the president and General Alexander are both saying, ‘trust us.’
“The same administration said ‘trust us’ on Benghazi till we changed the story four times,” Napolitano added. “The same administration said ‘trust us’ on the James Rosen, Fox News search-warrant affair. The same administration said ‘trust us’ on the IRS targeting conservatives.
“Why should we trust them?” he asked Cavuto. “Why should we trust these people?”
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