Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. RUBIO. Mr. President, actually, what the bill does is it requires, especially in cases of politically sensitive queries, that it be approved by a supervisor to take it out of the hands of the career individuals who in the past have or potentially have abused this authority.

Now, there are two ways to skin this cat. The challenge of the political appointees is twofold. The first is it is a political appointee. There is a person who owes their job to the party in power in the White House.

And so the thinking was that if you put someone like that in charge, it actually might lend itself to this being abused for political use.

The second is, it is actually harder to hold political appointees accountable. As we saw this week, the only way to get rid of, for example, the Attorney General would be to impeach them.

In this particular case, if it is a supervisor, that supervisor could be fired. Everyone in these Departments is ultimately accountable to the Attorney General and/or the FBI Director.

And I would add one more point. Another reform that is in this bill that is important to point to is that the compensation of the FBI Director will now be directly tied to how the Department performs every single year on the audit of compliance with 702.

So I urge this amendment be defeated. Vote on Amendment No. 1834

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Mr. RUBIO. Briefly, this is actually pretty narrowly tailored even though it is written in the way it is. It is tough to talk about in this setting. The information is available to all the Members and has been now for 5 or 6 days.

It is actually narrowly tailored to a very specific problem that was identified by the court. Basically the FISA Court of Review said that if there is an unintended gap in coverage revealed by their interpretation, you have to go to Congress to fix it. That is what this tries to do. It is important.

As I said, that information has been available to Members in the appropriate setting for the last few days.

I hope we can defeat this amendment. It is actually a 21st-century solution to a unique problem in an era in which telecommunications is rapidly evolving, and so are our adversaries.

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Mr. RUBIO. Anwar al-Awlaki was an American-born cleric who became a leader of al-Qaida. Syed Farook was born in America, and he murdered 14 people in a terrorist attack in San Bernardino. The brothers that committed the Boston marathon--one was naturalized, and the other was a lawful permanent resident. I could go on and on.

If we had suspected them of terrorism, we would not have been able to--and none of these were prevented. But if these cases emerged today and you suspected them of terrorism, under this amendment, you would not have been able to surveil them to prevent the terrorist attack. Afterward, you could have gone after them, but now it is too late to prevent the terrorist attack. That is what this amendment would--that is the harm that this amendment, if passed, would create, and I urge you to vote against it.

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Mr. RUBIO. Mr. President, there is some validity here, and the bill begins to cover some of it, but there is more we can do to fix this.

In Crossfire Hurricane, particularly in the case of Carter Page, the FBI agents lied to the court, and they inserted a dossier that proved to be opposition research, which you no longer can do under the reforms of this bill. You can no longer also include things like press media accounts of the case before them.

The function of this would be, on the other hand--and this is a real application because they would have probably brought it beyond that setting. Manuel Rocha was a spy in the Cuban Government, working for us as an Ambassador. Now he would have some advocate there arguing on his behalf in the court, someone who doesn't even have to have an intelligence background, and you may potentially even have to provide that advocate with intelligence information as exculpatory even though it really isn't exculpatory.

So this, as drafted, is problematic in the context of what we are trying to fix here, especially in light of the reforms that are already coming in as part of the bill.

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