Fox News anchor
Shepard Smith wasn't having any of the White House's defense of the USA Freedom Act, challenging press secretary Josh Earnest on his show on Tuesday.
Smith opened his program with a screed against the FISA courts, which he noted are called
"fake courts" by Fox News legal analyst Andrew Napolitano, and would still have power to grant warrants even under the new rules.
"So they'd still be all up in your business, and the White House and your Republican leadership on the Hill are now in lockstep on a matter that destroys your freedoms," Smith said.
Smith then brought on Earnest in a live feed from the White House press briefing room and asked him how President Barack Obama felt about "being in lockstep with the Bush administration and the leadership in the House and Senate and the Republicans."
Earnest made an attempt to explain the administration's position, but Smith jumped in repeatedly with questions such as, "What civil liberties protections, Josh?"
Smith said the courts would still have the same unfettered power to grant the National Security Agency the ability to gather phone records as they've previously had.
"They'd be able to do exactly what they want to do whenever they want to whether anyone is suspected of anything or not," he told Earnest. "Why is it OK from the perspective of our constitutional expert president for the rights of the people to be trampled in this way according to Judge Andrew Napolitano?"
"Well, Shep, obviously the administration strongly disagrees with what Mr. Napolitano had to say," Earnest replied. "The fact of the matter is 338 Democrats and Republicans in the House of Representatives also disagree with what he has to say."
Earnest said Obama has proposed changes that would allow for a representative at the FISA court to challenge NSA requests, and that Sen. Rand Paul is actually preventing the very changes he advocates from taking place by stalling passage of the USA Freedom Act.
Nothing Earnest said was able to sway Smith, who responded, "The president surely knows of this Fourth Amendment that says you can't just gather up willy-nilly information on people who aren't suspected of doing anything wrong."
He told Earnest he could lean on "this FISA court business … as long as you want, but someday history will say FISA court is not real and FISA court was not legitimate."
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