Pataki: Rand Paul made 'terrible mistake'

Sen. Rand Paul’s efforts to force the expiration of the PATRIOT Act were “irresponsible” and “dangerous,” Republican presidential candidate George Pataki said Tuesday.

“Right now we have no ability to monitor people we think are terrorists, potentially terrorists in this country. We have no ability to have roving wiretaps,” the former governor of New York said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” after a news report that several bomb threats had been called in on American domestic flights on Tuesday morning, including one that had landed safely in Philadelphia.


“We have no ability to access metadata with a court order to find out if a suspected terrorist is talking overseas. This is a very dangerous time. This is a very dangerous act. I think Rand Paul made a terrible mistake. I just hope that we don’t have any terrible consequences,” Pataki said, adding that the 9/11 Commission found that one of the contributing factors to the 2001 attacks under his watch as governor was a deficiency in intelligence gathering.

His tone is more extreme than the White House, which has said in recent days that while the lapse has left the U.S. vulnerable to “unnecessary risk,” authorities can keep existing investigations going. Also, more conventional tools are at officials’ disposal for new potential terror targets that pop up.

Pataki, however, said he is not fear-mongering by suggesting that the United States is at its highest risk for terrorism since 9/11.

“I was saying that before I was running,” he said, bringing up last month’s attack at a Muhammad cartoon exhibit in Garland, Texas.