Political Quotes

“that is an important question. First, I would like to thank the Senator for volunteering to serve in the forces of the United States to protect the security of our country and the Middle East and dangerous areas. We do need to protect our national security. We lost almost 3,000 people on 9/11. The Nation came together. I was a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee at the time, and we evaluated what to do about it. We worked together in a bipartisan way and in a virtually unanimous agreement passed the PATRIOT Act to try to help us be more effective in dealing with international terrorism. What I have to tell you is what we were facing. Many people were shocked to see the improper obstacles that were placed in the way of our intelligence community as they sought to try to figure out how to identify and capture people who wanted to do harm to America. It was stunning. There was a wall between the CIA, which did the foreign intelligence, and the FBI. They could not say to the FBI: We have intelligence that this person might be a terrorist. The FBI has jurisdiction within the United States. That wall was eliminated when we developed these intelligence tools. And we did other things in an overwhelmingly bipartisan way. As a person who spent 15 years as a prosecutor, I would say there is nothing in this act that alters the fundamental principles of what powers investigators have to investigate crime in America.…”