Sen. Rand Paul insisted on Tuesday that all those leaking information need to be found, after the Department of Justice announced it is charging a federal government contractor with top security clearance for leaking classified materials to a news outlet.
Speaking to Fox News' "Fox & Friends," the Kentucky senator said, "We just can't have everybody in the intelligence community, they have such power to suck up every bit of every transmission, every communication we ever made, we can't just have them willy-nilly releasing that to the public."
Paul insisted that this can be done, because "I guarantee there's a paper or a computer trail of who released these documents and who released these conversations."
Paul was the first senator to raise concerns about illegal unmasking or spying on American citizens, including himself, by the National Security Administration, possibly at the request of the Obama administration.
"If the Obama administration used intelligence for political purposes, this is a really, really serious abuse of power and must be investigated," the senator said. "We cannot live in fear of our own intelligence community."
Paul emphasized that "From top to bottom we need a reform and we need to go in and say, 'the American people need to have oversight of this'…we cannot let them listen to legislators' phone calls, we can't let them listen to the president's phone calls and blackmail the president."
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