John Shinkle/POLITICO Rand Paul calls out Jeb Bush for defending NSA He likened Bush's position on the NSA to his "confused" position on the Iraq War.

Rand Paul is slamming Jeb Bush over the former Florida governor’s defense of National Security Agency data collection, the latest round in the Kentucky senator’s battles with his own party on the issue.

“Just like he was confused for weeks about his position on the Iraq war, Gov. Bush appears completely unaware of the facts about the government’s illegal and unnecessary spying [on] the American people and made it clear his position is based on politics, not policy and the Constitution,” Paul spokesman Sergio Gor said in a statement on Wednesday, jabbing a likely 2016 rival over Bush’s previous equivocating about whether he would have invaded Iraq given the intelligence available now.

The Paul presidential campaign’s pushback follows an interview Bush gave to Fox News a day earlier, when Bush said that most of the criticism of the NSA stems from Democrats. His comments come after a heated debate in Congress over the reauthorization of the PATRIOT Act, during which Paul raised strenuous objections about data collection allowed under the law.

“While Rand Paul and a few others have expressed concerns about civil liberties — and I respect that although I don’t see any shred of evidence that anybody’s civil liberties are being violated — the great preponderance of people that want to overturn the Patriot Act are on the left,” Bush said on Fox, when asked whether there was a divide between the “Rand Paul wing and pretty much everyone else.” Bush continued, “And we need to … give people some room in the Democratic Party to be strong supporters of defending the homeland again. I think we need to restore a bipartisan consensus on this. The great majority of Republicans are supportive of the NSA.”

On Tuesday, Congress passed the USA Freedom Act, which sought to balance security measures with more privacy protections. Paul, who did not vote for the measure, has spent the better part of a week tearing into bulk data collection and forced the expiration of elements of the PATRIOT Act, a move that played well with his libertarian-leaning base but sparked outrage from more hawkish corners of his party.

Gor’s statement, an effort to fire back at that GOP criticism, referenced a bad week for Bush last month, when it took him days to say he wouldn’t have gone to war in Iraq given today’s knowledge of intelligence failures in the lead-up to the war.

Manu Raju contributed to this report.