The Left spent years telling Americans that Rand Paul was the enemy.
Now one of Kamala Harris’ own former aides just admitted he put his money where his mouth was — and it wasn’t with his party.
And when he explained why, the answer was something Democrats really don’t want their voters hearing right now.
Simmons Comes Clean About a 2015 Donation That Got Him in Hot Water
Jamal Simmons, a longtime political operative and former communications director for Kamala Harris, appeared on CNN’s Outfront to discuss President Donald Trump’s decision to appoint Housing Finance Agency boss Bill Pulte as the acting Director of National Intelligence.
Pulte, who would replace former DNI Tulsi Gabbard, has no intelligence experience, and his appointment drew sharp criticism from members of both parties.
Simmons went after Trump over it. No surprise there. But then the conversation took a turn nobody on the Left was expecting.
Simmons told the CNN audience: “We have been dancing with this tiger forever since 9/11. We’ve been building up this huge national security infrastructure. It’s gobbling up all the data that it can find, all the information about Americans that it can find. And we’ve been betting that good people weren’t going to do bad things with this infrastructure. And now we’re at the point where that might not be the case.”
That’s a remarkable thing for a Democrat operative and CNN contributor to say out loud. But he wasn’t done.
“When I got hired in the White House, I got in trouble with some of the Democrats because in 2015, I gave money to Rand Paul. I gave money to Rand Paul because he had a filibuster against the Patriot Act. And I wanted to say this was the right thing.”
He kept going.
“At some point, he was the only United States senator who stood up and said maybe we should slow down before we continue to build this infrastructure. Now here we are with somebody who does not appear to be trying to use this infrastructure to protect us, but instead use it to punish Donald Trump’s enemies.”
What Rand Paul Actually Did in 2015
The Patriot Act, passed after 9/11, broadly expanded law enforcement surveillance power domestically. Paul launched an over ten-hour-long filibuster of the Senate in 2015 to protest the renewal of the act.
Ten hours on the Senate floor. Most senators won’t stay awake that long, let alone fight that hard on principle.
Paul said from the floor: “There comes a time in the history of nations when fear and complacency allow power to accumulate and liberty and privacy to suffer. That time is now, and I will not let the Patriot Act, the most unpatriotic of acts, go unchallenged.”
Paul’s position was straightforward: the federal government had built a surveillance machine capable of vacuuming up the private communications of ordinary Americans, and nobody in Washington wanted to pump the brakes. Paul ran through several binders of material over the course of his marathon protest and got help from ten fellow senators, three Republicans and seven Democrats.
Seven Democrats joined him. That part tends to get left out of the story.
The Bigger Problem Nobody in Washington Wants to Talk About
Here’s what’s worth sitting with for a minute. A man who worked for Kamala Harris, who shows up on CNN to criticize Donald Trump, just told a national television audience that Rand Paul was right about government surveillance — and that he backed it up with his own checkbook.
Simmons got “in trouble” with Democrats for that donation. Think about what that means. His own party punished him for supporting a senator who stood up against warrantless government spying on American citizens. The Democrat Party’s position, apparently, was that building a massive domestic surveillance apparatus was fine as long as the right people were running it.
Now those same Democrats are suddenly very concerned about who controls that infrastructure. And Simmons, to his credit, connected the dots himself.
But there’s a certain irony here that deserves a harder look. The Left spent the better part of a decade dismissing concerns about government surveillance overreach as paranoia, fringe libertarianism, or worse. Rand Paul got mocked for it. Now, with a different administration in power, Democrats are rediscovering civil liberties at a pace that would make your head spin.
In Trump’s second term, Paul has been a frequent critic and target of the president. That’s a separate story. But Paul’s record on surveillance and individual liberty goes back years and doesn’t change based on who sits in the Oval Office. That’s the difference between principle and convenience.
The Surveillance State Is Bipartisan — and So Is the Danger
Simmons’ admission cuts against the preferred Democrat narrative in ways that are hard to paper over. The argument he made on CNN — that the intelligence infrastructure has grown too large, too hungry, and too dangerous to trust — is exactly what conservatives and libertarians have been saying for twenty years.
And the opposition to FISA reauthorization isn’t new territory for the Right. Concerns about warrantless government spying on American citizens have been a consistent part of the America First platform precisely because the people most likely to abuse that power are the same bureaucrats and political operatives who spent years trying to take down Donald Trump.
Simmons framed his concern around the Pulte appointment. Fair enough. But the machinery he’s now worried about didn’t get built overnight, and it didn’t get built by Republicans alone. Democrats voted for the Patriot Act. Democrats renewed it. Democrats blocked Paul’s attempts to rein it in.
Now one of their own is on CNN saying Paul was right all along.
That’s not a small thing. That’s a crack in the wall — and the Democrats who spent years building that wall know it.
Sources: Mediaite; CNN Outfront; CNN Politics (Rand Paul Patriot Act filibuster, May 2015); NPR; PBS NewsHour