Political Quotes

“Reclaiming my time, Mr. Baker, a former official at the Justice Department spent a considerable amount of time with the committee explaining to us exactly how the emergency process works. And so often people have focused on just the last part of the emergency process saying, call the Attorney General and he'll approve it. And that can take, that can be almost done at the speed of light. The Attorney General knows the call's coming, and it's kind of like you can get the approval very quickly. If that were the full extent of the emergency process, it might work. But Mr. Baker, in his testimony, says the emergency process, there are complications to it. I don't mean to sit here today, that you push a button, or it is not like, click, buy now on the Internet. It does take time. He goes on, so why does it take time? So the intelligence community has to do their investigation, make a judgment about what targets they want to pursue, when they've done that; and when they've reached a point where they realize that they need to do collection immediately, they start talking to us. The 'us' is the Justice Department. Going on, he says, then we work through the legal facts, the legal issues, the factual issues, at the same time that they are dealing with the technical stuff that they need to do. Then, when all of that is ready and they tell us we are ready to go, and they say, yes, we resolved all legal issues, we have no problem; then they call the Attorney General.”