Tuesday on Fox News Channel’s “Fox & Friends,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) said he wanted to know if presidential candidates were unmasked by the Obama administration for political purposes.

Paul said, “I’ve sent several letters to the Senate Intelligence Committee and the House Intelligence Committee and also the White House asking political figures were presidential candidates unmasked by 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. There are rumors swirling about Susan Rice. There are rumors now swirling about Samantha Powers. So we need to know. Were they actually looking into people’s phone calls for political purposes? If that happened, really, we have to do something about it. We cannot live in fear of our own intelligence community.”

He continued, “We cannot have anybody in the intelligence community —they have such power to suck up every bit of every transmission of every communication we ever made —We can’t have them willy-nilly releasing classified information to the public.”

He added, “We cannot live in fear of our own intelligence community. So, yes, absolutely 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 because we can’t let them listen to legislators phone calls or the president’s phone calls and blackmail the president. Something has to change.”

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