‘I’m not a fan of FISA’: Donald Trump bashes controversial ‘spy tool’ reauthorization as he stands alongside Speaker Mike Johnson, who led the passage hours before, but praises ‘checks and balances’ included in bill to avoid surveillance by Americans

Former President Donald Trump said Friday that he is ‘not a fan’ of the controversial spying tool that was reauthorized in the House that morning.

Congress has approved a two-year extension of a controversial foreign surveillance program that could help track foreign terrorists after a chaotic week of Republican battles.

‘I’m not a big fan of FISA. But I told everybody, I said, do what you want,” Trump said during a press conference at Mar-a-Lago, standing next to Speaker Mike Johnson.

‘They put a lot of checks and balances on and I guess it’s down to two years now, so it would come in the early part of my administration.’

“I probably know (FISA) better than anybody,” Trump claimed. ‘You know they spied on my campaign. You know that right? And they did many other bad things.’

Trump had trashed the chances of FISA’s passage headlining a failed rules vote to advance it earlier this week with a scathing post to Truth Social.

‘KILL FISA IT WAS ILLEGALLY USED AGAINST ME AND MANY OTHERS. THEY SPYED ON MY CAMPAIGN!!! DJT,’ Trump wrote.

But Johnson made a deal with Trump and his allies to renew it for only two years instead of five, so they could hash out more reforms under a potential Trump administration.

Another part of the law that is not up for reauthorization — Title 1 — was used to spy on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page in 2016 when he was suspected of communicating with the Russians. Trump reauthorized FISA in 2018.

Trump’s comments at Friday’s press conference were a more passive opposition.

Section 702 specifically allows the US government to monitor foreign nationals with suspected terrorist connections who are not on US soil, even if the party on the other side of such communications is a US citizen in America.

A strongly contested amendment from Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., to require a warrant before intercepting conversations of those on U.S. soil communicating with suspected terrorists failed in a rare tie, 212-212.

Speaker Mike Johnson cast the final vote that backed the amendment — a move sure to rankle hardliners.

“Being the vote that removed the amendment order certainly brought other members over to my side,” said Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Johnson, whom she has filed a motion to remove from the speakership.

‘This is a sad day for America. The Speaker does not always vote in the House of Representatives, but he was tied today. He voted against warrants,’ wrote Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., on X.

An amendment from Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, which would have required the FBI to provide quarterly reports on how many Americans had been questioned under 702, passed and was added to the bill.

The national security surveillance bill includes new guardrails aimed at oversight and transparency after a report showed that intelligence agents had improperly questioned Americans 278,000 times under the law.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) released a May 2023 report detailing how the FBI improperly used Section 702 to ‘query’ – or search for – names of people suspected of being on the Capitol grounds during the January 6, 2021 riots, Black Lives Matters protesters, victims of crime and their families, and donors to a congressional campaign.

FISA is set to expire on April 19, after which ‘America will go blind,’ Intelligence Chairman Mike Turner warned reporters.

Before the vote, Turner noted that FISA could have been used to spy on Al-Qaeda prior to the 9/11 attacks.

‘The perpetrators of 9/11 were in the United States and they communicated with Al-Qaeda,’ he said on the floor.

‘At that time we made a serious mistake and that we did not spy on al Qaeda and we did not see who they were communicating with United in the United States. we changed that and we started smoking al Qaeda and we got to see the extent to which they were recruiting people from the US to do us harm.’

Without Section 702, intelligence agents would not be able to get the full picture of conversations with suspected terrorists overseas who are communicating with people on American soil.

Rep. Dan Crenshaw, R-Texas, tore into the right-wing House Freedom Caucus and its allies, who want the FBI to have a warrant to intercept those conversations, which critics say would slow down the process of fighting terrorism.

‘Let’s be clear. Your position is aligned (and co-sponsored) with the progressive caucus – Jerry Nadler, AOC, Rashida Tlaib, Pramila Jayapal – the list goes on and on. It is the far-left socialists who want the same policy,” he said.

‘What the progressives want to do is much more than just fix the program, they want to kill it completely. I’m not surprised when Rashida Tlaib wants to make it easier for terrorists to kill Americans, but I am VERY surprised that many Republicans agree with her.’

Crenshaw’s amendment to allow international drug traffickers to be questioned under 702, in addition to terrorists, was passed into the bill.

Crenshaw compared it to a criminal investigative wiretapping. Police do not need a warrant to investigate conversations with suspects and the people they talk to. He noted that intelligence agents need to trace potential terrorists’ conversations with those in the United States at early stages, potentially before a judge would approve a warrant for “probable cause.”

“This requirement — while perhaps well-intentioned — would actually destroy our ability to detect domestic terrorist attacks (or drug trafficking or espionage) because it prevents our investigators from moving past Step 1 of the investigative process, which is simply connecting the dots with data we already legally have.’

Biggs, who sponsored the warrant demand, shot back: ‘You have joined the DC cartel that insists on spying on Americans and violating the Bill of Rights.’

Crenshaw claimed the FBI ‘HATES’ the new reforms in the bill. ‘It seriously impairs their access to the FISA database. It imposes criminal penalties for abusing it. It makes it clear that you cannot search anyone for any reason, but only for investigations related to foreign intelligence, weapons of mass destruction or terrorism.’

While many of Section 702’s uses remain classified, intelligence officials leaked late last year that they had used the controversial tool to prevent arms sales to Iran.

The CIA and other intelligence agencies had used information gathered by monitoring the electronic communications of foreign arms manufacturers and stopped several shipments of advanced weapons to Iran.

On Thursday, FBI Director Christopher Wray issued a dire warning to members of Congress about what could happen if FISA expires. “It will massively increase the risk of missing crucial intelligence at a time of heightened national security threats across a multitude of fronts,” Wray said.

‘If we are blinded from seeing what our adversaries are, who they are working with, I can tell you that it will certainly have consequences for our ability to protect the American people because I can assure that none of our adversaries are tying their own hands. So now is not the time for us to hang up the gloves’.

The ODNI report says 13 people linked to January 6 were inappropriately questioned to determine whether they had ‘extraneous ties’.

In addition, over 130 people were searched in the database, who were connected to the social unrest and riots carried out by Black Lives Matter activists in the wake of the 2020 murder of George Floyd.

The FISA search was conducted to obtain information about whether they were connected to counterterrorism plans — which the DOJ wrote in the report was “reasonable,” but the high level of redactions does not allow for a fuller explanation.

There was also a ‘batch request’ of over 19,000 donors to a congressional campaign which was unnamed.

The FBI analyst who conducted the search said the campaign was a possible target of foreign influence.

But the Justice Department said there were only ‘eight identifiers’ used in the search in total that ‘had sufficient ties to foreign influence activities to meet the inquiry standard’.

In addition, FBI FISA searches were conducted on crime victims, including “persons listed in police homicide reports, including victims, relatives, witnesses, and suspects.”

The DOJ said those inquiries were improper because there was no “reasonable basis” to expect that the individuals would be linked to foreign intelligence through those searches.