House Republican
leaders are demanding serious reforms of the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)
if they are to renew it rather than let it lapse in December.
This is a dangerous threat to a much-needed national security program. But recent documented abuses are, as
FBI
Director Christopher Wray
conceded, “totally unacceptable.” Wray’s promises of internal intelligence community reforms are not credible and are unacceptable. Real accountability for past FISA malfeasance is necessary. Absent that, it is difficult to justify the program.
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Passed in the wake of Watergate, FISA put limits on what intelligence agencies may do to surveil domestic targets. The NSA and CIA are still free to do just about anything to intercept the communications of targets outside the U.S., but after FISA, any gathering of intelligence on domestic targets had to be handled by the FBI and approved by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC).
The protections are an improvement over the pre-Watergate era but have been abused. In the last few years, an FBI lawyer lied on a FISA application to secure a warrant to spy on the presidential campaign of Donald Trump. Despite being caught red-handed betraying his office, he escaped with just a slap on the wrist and is still allowed to practice law. It was the FBI’s actions related to the investigation of the Trump campaign that Wray said were “totally unacceptable.”
More recently, an April 2022 FISC opinion was declassified last month showing that for the year ending in November 2021, the FBI improperly used warrantless search powers on domestic targets more than 278,000 times. The domestic targets included George Floyd and January 6 rioters, as well as donors to an unidentified congressional campaign.
An FBI spokesman said the findings in the April 2022 FISC opinion were “completely unacceptable” but then added that “the FBI changed its querying procedures to make sure these errors do not happen again.
“We are committed to continuing this work and providing greater transparency into the process to earn the trust of the American people,” the FBI spokesman continued.
These admissions of error, promises of change, and lack of consequences for the perpetrators are grossly insufficient. The FBI has lost all credibility after
the Durham Report established a partisan pattern of abuse.
FBI pleas for internal reforms alone are self-serving.
Reps. Mike Turner (R-OH), Darin LaHood (R-IL), and Mike Garcia (R-CA) have all pledged not to reauthorize FISA when it expires unless there are significant reforms.
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“We’ve talked about criminal penalties, criminal culpability, criminal liability,” LaHood told the
Washington Examiner
. “We want to be careful not to have a chilling effect, but I think there is a happy medium there that we haven’t reached yet.
Whatever reforms House Republicans decide to push should not be designed to hobble the program, but considering the FBI’s recent behavior, perhaps a chilling effect is needed.
