WASHINGTON DC, May 10 — “Benjamin Franklin said those that would be willing to give up freedom for security deserve neither,” as Congressman Jeff Van Drew [R-NJ] put it in a recent interview with Rebecca Weber, CEO of the Association of Mature American Citizens, on her Better For America podcast. “We were promised at the last renewal of FISA [The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978] that everything would be okay. That there would be no abuse, that the system would work. And what did we find out? We saw abuse not a few times, not hundreds of times, not thousands of times, but over that whole entire time period [over five years], millions of times.”
He warned that “if the government is worried, if Homeland Security is worried, if the FBI is worried, they should be looking at what’s going on at our borders? We have millions of people who have come into this country. We don’t know who many of them are. [But we do] know that some of them are on the terror watch list.”
Van Drew said that, meanwhile, the Biden administration has been targeting “men and women that might be more conservative, men and women that might support Donald Trump, men and women that have certain political beliefs. In some cases, those that were very religious.”
The Congressman went on to note that public trust is way down among the American people and they don’t trust our government. “It hurts me to say it, but with good reason, I do not trust our government. I’ve seen it all. Things I would have never believed years ago. [For example], it is true that the FBI had a plan in place to send undercover agents to [search] Roman Catholic churches, because they were considering them to be domestic terrorists. Thank God we caught them; it’s not the America that we believe in.”
It’s well known that Van Drew used to be a conservative Democrat but he said “there was no room for me because of all the issues we just spoke about and many more. So I decided that, maybe I was done, which is fine. Everybody has a political cycle. It doesn’t mean you do it forever. And then I got a call from the president of the United States, Donald Trump. He said, I want to talk to you. We spoke for an hour and a half. I became a Republican and then we had a big rally in Wildwood, New Jersey. It was a huge party. Not only did we celebrate, but he spoke about the issues. He fired people up. [President Trump] just puts so much energy in the air. It was magic. He promised to Make America Great Again [because] we love the United States of America. We want it to be the greatest nation that ever was on the face of the earth.”
As for the FISA bill, he said he did not and will not support or vote for it. “Just because you’re from the government, you can’t go after people you don’t agree with or because they’re different or whatever. If they’re dangerous and you need to investigate, whether it’s through technology or whatever means, get a warrant. A judge can give it to you quickly. And by the way, if it’s a real case of national security our bill provides exceptions. So, if something very terrible is going to happen, there are exceptions to it. The bottom line is that it’s a bad bill. It’s the wrong thing. It sets a bad precedent. We were told in the past that it would be okay, but we saw what happened. We had agents looking up girlfriends, boyfriends, people they didn’t like, husbands or wives, all kinds of things that just didn’t pertain to national security at all. That’s what happens when you give unchecked power to government. The beauty of America is that we don’t allow that to happen, or we didn’t allow it to happen. We’ve got to get back to that again. I know I speak with President Trump on a weekly basis. He is going to change this when he gets in. And we’ll be able to make some real change.
John Grimaldi served on the first non-partisan communications department in the New York State Assembly and is a founding member of the Board of Directors of Priva Technologies, Inc. He has served for more than thirty years as a Trustee of Daytop Village Foundation, which oversees a worldwide drug rehabilitation network.