Sen. Rand Paul On John McCain Saying Armed Services Committee Will Investigate Trump Admin’s Link To Russia: I Think That Might Be Excessive

U.S. Senator of Kentucky and former presidential candidate Rand Paul joined Kilmeade and Friends today to discuss Sen. John McCain saying the Armed Services Committee will have an investigation into the Trump administration’s link to Russia in light of Lieutenant General Michael Flynn resigning as National Security Adviser last night.

Sen. McCain released a statement this morning which read:

General Flynn’s resignation also raises further questions about the Trump administration’s intentions toward Vladimir Putin’s Russia, including statements by the President suggesting moral equivalence between the United States and Russia despite its invasion of Ukraine, annexation of Crimea, threats to our NATO allies, and attempted interference in American elections.

During his interview with Brian Kilmeade, Sen. Rand Paul said, “I think that might be excessive. I think it looks like the President has handled the situation and unless there’s some kind of other evidence of malfeasance, this sounds like something that was internal White House politics and it looks like the President’s handled it.” Sen. Paul continued, “I just don’t think it’s useful to be doing investigation after investigation, particularly of your own party. We’ll never even get started with doing the things we need to do like repealing Obamacare if we’re spending our whole time having Republicans investigate Republicans. I think it makes no sense.”

Brian Kilmeade: What is your take on the Lieutenant General stepping aside because of a conversation he had with the Russian ambassador before he took office and not being completely candid to the Vice President and others?

Sen. Paul: I don’t know all the details so it’s hard to comment. But I will tell you I was reminded of when President Obama sort of whispered to Medvedev about, you know wait until after the election we’ll take care of this, indicating there would be a different opinion. If I had to suspect, and I’m suspecting something like what President Obama said was said, and then the question is, is there is some sort of illegality to that, impropriety to that? You can disagree with a policy obviously, but that’s a policy disagreement. But I think the real problem is in an administration people have to trust each other, and apparently there is discussion that there’s a transcript of this, because people need to realize the NSA monitors all of your phone calls, so apparently there’s a transcript that directly contradicts what he was saying and I think that ultimately became the problem.

Sen. Paul on President Trump’s private phone calls being leaked:

It’s interesting when you look at the NSA’s monitoring of phone calls they have something called minimization. So there was a little line in the Washington Post from a couple years ago that ought to shock people, that the president himself was minimized 1,500 times in one year. This is President Obama, so that means that they’re recording President Obama’s conversations and then they agree not to listen to them, but that’s a great deal of power. And I’m not insinuating the NSA had anything to do with this, I’m just saying that we have to realize that we have given power to an agency to record not only every American’s phone calls, but even the President’s phone calls. I’m not saying that’s where the leaks came from, most likely the leaks came from humans that are involved with the process either at State Department or White House, but I am concerned that we are recording everybody’s phone calls including the President.

On the possibility of Gen. David Petraeus replacing Lt. Gen. Flynn as National Security Adviser:

First off, this is President Trump’s pick and this is somebody that won’t be approved by the Senate, so officially no one will ask my advice and consent on this. Unofficially, I would say that once again trust is important if trust was the problem previously. You want somebody very much who can be trusted.  It is a problem, and was a problem with Hillary Clinton putting classified information out there for the viewing of anybody who hacked into her email. It is also a problem if you share classified information with your mistress, so that has to be considered. But ultimately, you know President Trump’s going to have to make that decision.

On repealing and replacing Obamacare:

I agree with Congressman Jordan. We ought to immediately repeal it. And I’ve also been discussing with the Freedom Caucus a replacement package I’ve presented to them which is not a big government replacement, but basically adding free market reforms that show that we as Republicans do care about getting more insurance at a cheaper cost to more people. And so I think we do need to have a replacement plan in the sense that healthcare was broken even before Obamacare, Obamacare made it worse. As we get rid of Obamacare it needs to be replaced with something that allows people to get more insurance at less cost. And there are market reforms that we can, this is in my bill, Senate bill 222 which is Obamacare replacement. I think it’s going to be introduced by some members of the house this week and we’ll be talking more about that. But yes we need to do both, we need to do both at the same time and we need to show that Republicans do care about getting insurance for as many people at the least amount of cost… Let’s just repeal the whole thing.

Listen to the full interview below: