Political Quotes

“If I could respond to the last point. The matter about which the court has some degree of discretion is in the way it weighs the affidavit presentation relative to the underlying predicate for the warrant, the activities that are being engaged in, the purchase of the ticket, the presence of box cutters, all that information. The court weighs all that. It is presented in the affidavit, and the court makes a decision. It is enough or it is not enough. To some extent, you can say that is discretion. It is really applying the evidence to the probable cause test, weighing it and determining whether the evidence meets the case. In any event, that is where the court has some leeway to decide. Where the court does not have any leeway is to something that is either a fact or it is not. That is, Does this person qualify or not? That is to say, is the person an appropriate subject for the warrant or not? If you were asserting, for example, that the individual was a member of the Baader-Meinhoff gang, there would have to be evidence in the affidavit that is clear enough for the court to reach that conclusion or the court would say, sorry, this person does not qualify for a FISA warrant. I cannot find enough evidence in here that he is a member of the Baader-Meinhoff gang or a spy for the Soviet Union. But with respect to whether this person is a non-United States person, that is something that will either be fairly true or not. It is either going to be true or not.”