Rep. Peter King (R., N.Y.) went after Kentucky Senator Rand Paul's (R., Ky.) statistics of purported NSA abuse of phone record collection on "Fox News Sunday."
King called Paul's assertion that "billions of phone calls" were being collected by the NSA totally inaccurate and said if those stats were correct then the 3,000 reported errors by the NSA would be insignificant and indicate the program is working correctly:
JOHN ROBERTS: Congressman King, you are a staunch defender of the NSA and its programs, you call the people that work there, quote, "patriots." But would also appear very clear that mistakes are being made and in many cases they are not, as they should be, reporting those mistakes.
PETER KING: John I totally disagree with that and I fully disagree with what Senator Rand Paul said. That was a grab bag of misinformation and distortion coming from him. The fact is John look at this, take Rand Paul's own numbers. He said there's billions of phone calls being collected - it is not really true, but assume he is being right for once. "Billions of phone calls being collected." You juxtapose that with 2800 violations which were self reported by the NSA which did not violate anyone's rights. You are talking about 1900 of them being foreigners when they came to the U.S. because they had a foreign mobile phone it wasn't immediately transferred over the way that it was supposed to be. No Americans' rights were violated with that. The others were, records that were kept for more than five years by accident, self reported by the NSA. To me a scandal is when a government agency is somehow using information to hurt people and go after them. Whatever mistakes were made were inadvertent and if you have a 99.9 percent batting average, that is better than most media people do, most politicians do, and I have a tremendous respect for General Alexander and the NSA and this whole tone of snooping and spying that we use, I think it's horrible. It is a distortion and a smear and a slander of good, patriotic Americans.