House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, Ohio Republican, took a swipe at national security hawks over their insistence that the government’s top spying tool be reauthorized without a warrant requirement.
“The same people who spied on President Trump’s campaign are now fighting against a warrant requirement in the new FISA bill,” Mr. Jordan said in a post on X. “Makes you wonder.”
Former special counsel John Durham last year concluded in his report that the FBI should not have launched its “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation into the purported ties between the Trump campaign and Russia during the 2016 election.
The FBI and the intelligence community have leaned on congressional lawmakers for over a year to re-up the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act without a warrant requirement.
Rep. Ray LaHood, Illinois Republican and member of the Intelligence Committee, told The Washington Times there are new tools in the bill to hold the FBI accountable.
“We now created six new criminal statutes in the federal judiciary and the federal criminal code. So now, if [FBI‘s] upper management, the special counsel, or the DOJ now has the ability under the criminal statutes to charge them,” he said.
“If this happened again with Crossfire Hurricane, I would predict there’d be four to five people within the FBI personnel that would be indicted by now.”
House Intelligence Committee Chair Mike Turner, Ohio Republican, appeared on CNN’s “State of the Union” and said that opponents of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act reauthorization bill to be brought to the floor this week are mischaracterizing the legislation’s Section 702 provision.
Section 702 allows the government to collect huge amounts of electronic data from foreigners living abroad, though Americans’ communications can be ensnared if they are communicating with foreign targets. The controversy arises when the FBI wants to run an American’s identity against the data.
“I think that those who mischaracterize this are small compared to those who understand that this goes to the heart of our ability to get intelligence,” Mr. Turner said after saying he believes the bill will pass. “It allows us to be able to keep Americans safe. This is not a warrantless surveillance of Americans.”
He later added that the government is not surveilling foreigners in the U.S. and that those individuals who say that FISA’s 702 provision is a warrantless search, “are just not telling the truth.”
He said the provision is targeted strictly toward foreigners abroad.
“They’re a select group of individuals who are a national security threat,” he said.
Rep. Warren Davidson, Ohio Republican, responded to Mr. Turner’s remarks on X saying, “Not only are they spying on American citizens without a warrant, they are seeking to expand the spying and block bipartisan legislation requiring a warrant to search American citizens’ data.”
Sen. Mike Lee, Utah Republican, on X, accused House Republicans of creating a “fake national security” distraction to convince the chamber to adjourn when lawmakers were ready to pass legislation prohibiting warrantless searches of Americans’ private communications under FISA 702.
Mr. Turner defended his remarks in February when he said that the Biden administration “was sleepwalking into an international crisis.”
He released a cryptic statement about “a serious” threat related to Russian nukes in space, and requested that the White House declassify all information relating to it.
Congress is racing toward an April 19 deadline for the expiration of Section 702. Nearly all members agree that the program needs changes, particularly after a series of damning reports about abuses in the top-secret program. But lawmakers disagree on how far to go.
The House is slated to take up the fight first with a bill reaching the floor this week, after several previous false starts.
Sponsored by Rep. Laurel Lee, Florida Republican, the bill contains several changes that FBI Director Christopher Wray and the intelligence community can stomach and skips the warrant requirement the FBI doesn’t want.
Lawmakers are expected to have a chance to add the warrant requirement through the amendment process on the House floor.