The intelligence community, for the most part, has no accountability at all to the Congress, to us the American people, and so they feel that they above the law.

The remark condemns what Naylor portrays as a democratic deficit in U.S. intelligence and national-security institutions: secrecy and insulated chains of command can weaken meaningful oversight by elected representatives and, by extension, the public. The claim that such agencies “feel that they [are] above the law” frames the problem not merely as bureaucratic opacity but as a structural temptation toward impunity—where covert powers (surveillance, classification, clandestine operations) can outpace the mechanisms meant to restrain them. Read this way, the quote functions as a civic warning: when accountability is minimal, legality becomes negotiable, and citizens’ consent is undermined because they cannot evaluate or contest actions carried out in their name.