Says President Barack Obama “came into office very concerned about” wiretappings but “then he became president of the United States, he got all the briefings … (and) he decided … the balance is probably pretty appropriately struck.”
Bill Kristol on Dec. 22, 2013, in comments on ABC’s “This Week”
Pundits got their turn Dec. 22 to weigh in on the news of that week regarding the National Security Agency’s once-secret surveillance programs, dissecting recommendations to restrict the program from an advisory panel and a ruling from a federal judge in D.C. that the phone data collection program is likely unconstitutional.
Was the news a validation of NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden, an obvious affirmation of Americans’ privacy rights?
On ABC’s “This Week,” conservative pundit Bill Kristol seemed to downplay the events of the week, calling the D.C. judge’s ruling an outlier.
“I don’t agree with all the stuff, ‘Thank God for Edward Snowden, we wouldn’t be having this debate.’ We had a big debate in Congress on this in 2006, 2007, and in fact we passed legislation in 2007. We had a big debate about this, President (Barack) Obama discussed this. President Obama is a constitutional law professor, he came into office very concerned about the terrible …”
ABC political analyst Matthew Dowd jumped in as Kristol spoke to say Obama’s performance in this area is “exceedingly disappointing.”
“I’m sorry, then he became president of the United States,” Kristol replied. “He got all the briefings, he saw seriously what was going on, and basically he decided, I think, correctly, that you know what, the balance is probably pretty appropriately struck. Now he’s shifting … entirely because of optics.”
We wanted to know if Kristol is correct about Obama’s evolution on government spying programs.
Obama in the Senate
In his early years in the Senate, Obama was a reliable critic of the post-Sept. 11 surveillance efforts launched by President George W. Bush.
In 2005, The New York Times exposed a Bush executive order allowing the NSA to tap Americans’ international phone calls and emails in an effort to track terrorists without seeking search warrants from the courts. The Times reported the agency was still seeking warrants for monitoring domestic communications.
As the Senate voted to reauthorize the Patriot Act that same week, Obama decried the administration’s “fishing expedition” of Americans’ everyday electronic records in a floor speech.
In a 2006 speech explaining why he would vote against confirming Michael Hayden as the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Obama said:
“We don’t expect the president to give the American people every detail about a classified surveillance program. But we do expect him to place such a program within the rule of law, and to allow members of the other two co-equal branches of government — Congress and the judiciary — to have the ability to monitor and oversee such a program.”
And: “We need to find a way forward to make sure that we can stop terrorists while protecting the privacy, and liberty, of innocent Americans.”
Obama as a candidate for president
Fast-forward to 2007. Obama is running for president — and still criticizing Bush for operating without enough oversight.
He said the Bush administration “puts forward a false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we provide.”
According to the Des Moines Register (via National Review Online), he said, “When I am president, there will be no more illegal wiretapping of American citizens. No more national security letters to spy on citizens who are not suspected of a crime. No more tracking citizens who do nothing more than protest a misguided war.”
The next year, however, he faced charges of flip-flopping on warrantless wiretapping by his Republican rival, Sen. John McCain.
At issue was legislation in 2008 that rewrote the rules of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the 1978 law that lays out rules for spying in the country and created a secret court of judges to oversee it. Congress amended the law amid backlash. One of the most controversial questions was whether to grant retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies that had turned over network data to the government, as the companies were vulnerable to lawsuits following the Times expose.
Obama’s campaign said he would oppose a bill that provided retroactive immunity for the companies.
But he ended up joining 68 senators who voted for it, disappointing some on the left as well as advocates of civil liberties.
The changes to FISA in 2008 essentially legalized warrantless wiretapping that had been going on, Molly Bishop Shadel, an expert in foreign intelligence law at the University of Virginia School of Law, previously told us.
Obama defended his vote to supporters by saying the new law includes checks and balances that weren’t in place before.
Still, PolitiFact rated McCain’s claim that Obama flip-flopped after promising to filibuster a bill that provided retroactive immunity to the telecommunications companies as True.
Obama as president
No substantial legislative oversight has been added to the Patriot Act since Obama took over the White House.
Obama signed a five-year extension of the FISA Amendments Act in December 2012.
Following Snowden’s revelations, Obama defended two surveillance programs using some of the language Kristol mentioned.
“You can’t have 100 percent security and also have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience. We’re going to have to make some choices as a government,” Obama said.
Our ruling
Kristol said Obama “came into office very concerned about” wiretappings but “then he became president of the United States, he got all the briefings … (and) he decided … the balance is probably pretty appropriately struck.”
That’s true, to a point.
Obama’s concerns for Bush-era surveillance tactics have certainly dwindled since he took office — and he has defended ongoing, recently exposed confidential surveillance programs.
But Obama’s opinions shifted even before he moved into the White House. Most notably, he voted for a bill that essentially approved warrantless wiretapping in July 2008. The shift was so notable that his presidential rival at the time called him a flip-flopper.
We rate Kristol’s statement Mostly True.
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