Barbara McQuade

In the Nixon administration and in the FBI of J. Edgar Hoover, surveillance powers were used to monitor political enemies like Martin Luther King or Vietnam protesters or other civil rights leaders.

We saw the enactment of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that made it clear that the president can only monitor and surveil and wiretap people under certain circumstances.

They have to either use the FISA court, which requires review by a court before you can monitor foreign intelligence targets, or that Title III, the wiretap law, is required for other investigations.

All of that leaves some areas of gray about what's permitted in the in-between.

We know that arguments have made in the past that the president has inherent authority to protect the national security and to engage in surveillance.

But it was considered a grand bargain at the time between the White House and Congress that this would be the only way that surveillance would be conducted.

However, the White House, as from time to time, notably in the Bush administration, made the argument that the president has inherent authority even beyond those two tools to collect surveillance.

Do we know whether...

Kash Patel has asserted that authority and is using surveillance against Trump's political enemies.

I don't know.

But I think the fact that President Trump has said, I'm going to do what I believe I can do, not what I should do.

I worry about whether that they are using surveillance tools against the rest of us to blow through those norms that were put in place after Watergate.

You raise a really important point and that one that Republicans in particular have always made, which is the importance in our federal system of states' rights.

Our system of comity, C-O-M-I-T-Y, is that we respect the rights of states and local government to do their work.

And so an attorney general or a Manhattan district attorney who is doing their work and then find themselves targeted by the Justice Department for their work is a very disturbing use of federal power to squash state and local power.

And I think that is something that should concern all of us.

You know, there were times when the tables were turned and we saw Democrats who favored the use of federal power, and it was Republicans who supported state power.

But if you were to ask the framers of our Constitution, their view of this, they would say, well, the 10th Amendment reserves powers for the states.

That is what they are supposed to do.

And so this is a violation of