As House members returned to Washington this week, Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., was already struggling to rally his caucus around a bill to extend a 9/11-era surveillance program. The effort to reauthorize the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act’s Section 702 had already split the House GOP for months. but a compromise of sorts was finally about to hit the floor Wednesday, just days before the program is set to expire.
And then former President Donald Trump weighed in.
“KILL FISA, IT WAS ILLEGALLY USED AGAINST ME AND MANY OTHERS. THEY SPIED ON MY CAMPAIGN!!!” he wrote on Truth Social, resurrecting one of his long-standing false claims about the 2016 election. And the bill being debated didn’t concern all of FISA, just Section 702. But Trump’s post was enough to bolster a revolt among conservative Republicans, 19 of whom voted with Democrats to block the reauthorization bill from coming up for debate. For once, though, the GOP’s disarray and obedience to Trump fortuitously may be put to good use. While Trump’s “Spygate” narrative remains false, it may be harnessed to improve a broken part of America’s intelligence-gathering system.
For once, though, the GOP’s disarray and obedience to Trump fortuitously may be put to good use.
Section 702 was first tacked on to FISA in 2008 to legalize a once-secret program intelligence agencies use to stockpile communications data from foreigners living abroad without warrants. It quickly became clear that key safeguards, which were meant to protect Americans’ data caught up in the sweep from being reviewed without warrants, were failing. A court order released last year from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which oversees the use of FISA’s spying tools, showed that the FBI had repeatedly violated its own standards for searching Section 702 data for information about Americans.
We should be careful not give Trump too much credit, though. Again, his claims about FISA’s being used to…
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