In a foreign policy speech on Monday ahead of his likely impending presidential campaign announcement, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie proposed stronger government surveillance and criticized “civil liberties extremists” who have been skeptical of the federal government’s intelligence collection programs.
“Let me be clear: all these fears are baloney,” Christie said during his speech in New Hampshire, railing against Democrats’ opposition to the domestic surveillance programs of the National Security Agency. “When it comes to fighting terrorism, our government is not the enemy.”
The New Jersey governor called the surveillance opponents “intellectual purists who are afraid of abuses that haven’t occurred” and said the programs could prevent future attacks from killing U.S. citizens. He also called for extending the 2001 Patriot Act — a tool he said he used extensively and legally as U.S. Attorney. But a provision of the program was found to be illegal by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit earlier this month in a ruling that said the collection of “metadata” from Americans’ phone calls was not the original intention of Congress in passing the Patriot Act.
“We shouldn’t listen to people like Edward Snowden, a criminal who hurt our country and now enjoys the hospitality of President Putin — while sending us messages about the dangers of authoritarian government,” Christie said.
While Christie gave his unwavering support for government surveillance during the speech, he hasn’t always supported government-sponsored spying programs. When it was discovered in 2012 that the New York Police Department was spying on Muslims in New Jersey, he called the surveillance “disturbing” and said his office would take “a real good, strong hard look at it from a policy perspective.”
“I don’t know if this NYPD action was born out of arrogance, or out of paranoia, or out of both,” he said on the radio at the time, criticizing the fact that the NYPD conducted activity in New Jersey without communicating with New Jersey law enforcement. The next year, Christie signed a bill requiring out-of-state enforcement agencies to report surveillance in New Jersey.
In Monday’s speech, Christie also called for expanding the U.S. military and defense spending and criticized President Obama’s handling of the emerging Iran nuclear agreement and ISIS. When discussing the need to fight extremists around the world, he spoke about his personal experiences fighting terrorism everyday as a U.S. Attorney.
Christie isn’t the first potential 2016 Republican to lay out plans to continue controversial domestic surveillance. In his first foreign policy speech since launching his campaign, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) also called last week for permanently extending the Patriot Act, saying that “we cannot let politics cloud the importance of this issue.”
Christie and Rubio’s position has pitted them at odds with their competitor Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), who criticized domestic surveillance in his campaign launch speech.