WASHINGTON – Today in the Senate Judiciary Committee, U.S. Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) questioned Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director Kash Patel on the expiration of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and the importance of reauthorizing this critical national security tool. Excerpts of Sen. Cornyn’s remarks are below, and video can be found here.

CORNYN: “It’s been about three months and three days since Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act has expired and not been reauthorized by Congress.”

“Do you continue to believe that it’s important for Congress to reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and what happens once the certification by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Courts runs out?”

PATEL: “What the FBI does not do is collect on U.S. citizens. What the FBI does do is access, pursuant to the federal statute, already lawfully collected information of individuals who are overseas and are not USPERs. Were we prohibited to do that in the future – we’ve provided classified briefings to the Senate and the House and a litany of examples on terrorist attacks that we’ve prevented, children that we found, narcotraffickers that we were able to annihilate and arrest based solely on 702 collection of overseas non-USPER individuals.”

“We want those methodologies to be able to be available to the FBI. Were that to go dark, we would have a lot of problems, or we would have no ability to trace that information.”