Rand Paul fundraises off filibuster with false claim of how it started

You can't blame Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) for trying to convert his filibuster into a fundraising opportunity, but as David Corn flags, Paul's new fundraising pitch is based on a false accounting of what happened. The key portion of his letter to "Dear Patriot" begins:

I had been trying for more than a week to get a straight answer on whether or not the Obama administration believed it had the authority to use drones to target and kill American citizens on American soil ' without due process.

And after receiving a letter from Attorney General Eric Holder claiming they DO have that authority, I could no longer sit silently at my desk in the U.S. Senate.

So I stood for thirteen-straight hours to send a message to the Obama administration, I will do everything in my power to fight their attempts to ignore the Constitution!

The letter in which Paul asked his question is here and Holder's response is here. Holder did effectively say yes, but only in the context of preventing an imminent attack such as the bombing of Pearl Harbor or 9/11.

But while Rand Paul claims in his letter to have been horrified by that answer, yesterday on Fox News, Paul actually took Holder's position. "I've never argued that the president doesn't have the right to make immediate decisions to protect our country from attack when it's an imminent attack like that [that being 9/11], F-16s were scrambling, I have no opposition to that." That's exactly Holder's position, but despite agreeing with it on Fox, in his fundraising letter, Paul said he could "no longer sit silently" after hearing it.

To be fair to Paul, the mere fact that a fundraising letter misrepresented the reason for his filibuster doesn't necessarily mean the filibuster was pointless self-aggrandizement. But as I argue below the fold, I do believe that by deciding to focus his filibuster on the question of whether the president has the right to order a death robot strike against a noncombatant citizen on U.S. soil turned it into a political circus instead of a serious effort to address questions about domestic drone usage.