Rove said such programs were essential to the war on terror. Rove supports NSA surveillance

Former Bush adviser Karl Rove is defending the National Security Agency’s data collection, saying it’s needed to keep the country safe and has bipartisan support.

Appearing Thursday on “On the Record with Greta Van Susteren,” Rove said he couldn’t compare the current surveillance efforts to those implemented under President George W. Bush, but added that such programs were essential to the war on terror.


“To identify patterns of phone calls between individuals here and individuals abroad, and then you identify the patterns of phone calls inside this country … that allows the intelligence agencies to identify connections between people abroad and people at home. And as we saw in the Boston Marathon bombing incident, home-grown terrorists or terrorists who are sleeper cells inside the United States are a threat,” Rove said.

( PHOTOS: 18 ‘wars’ on _____)

Rove said if used effectively, such efforts could possibly have prevented the Sept. 11 and Boston attacks.

He said Americans who are concerned about the surveillance should take comfort that both Republicans and Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee had praised it. Other problems with the White House shouldn’t cloud Americans’ view of intelligence gathering, Rove said.

“I’m not going to defend the Obama administration. I will defend the intelligence community,” Rove said. “I would be very cautious about lumping what the administration has done on these other instances, the IRS, the AP, James Rosen and Benghazi, with this, which is not being directed out of the White House. This is not the kind of stuff that’s flown across the desk of Valerie Jarrett.”