Barbara McQuade
speaker
424 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Oct 2025
last heard 7 Feb
Barbara McQuade’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.
Appearances
What is the public safety goal here?
What is the likely sentence that will be achieved if
the only outcome here is going to be probation, then maybe that's not a good use of our resources.
But there are also prohibited factors like race, religion, and political association.
So those are things we're seeing violated.
The other thing that came along was control over the way the president uses surveillance powers.
So because we knew that
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.
Showing 241–260 of 424 · page 13 of 22
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