Mike Johnson Signals House Will Forge Ahead After GOP Holdouts Threatened Obstruction Of Votes
'I'm excited to bring them back'
If Congress Can Rush To ‘Save’ FISA, Then It Can Pass The SAVE Act To Protect America’s Elections
The election integrity leader says the House should 'hold the Senate hostage', declining FISA without the SAVE America Act.The FBI should get a warrant before reading your messages
Conservatives have spent decades fighting government overreach. We have opposed IRS targeting of Tea Party groups, regulatory power-grabs, and agencies that treat the Bill of Rights as a suggestion. So explain this: Why are Republican leaders in Congress lining up to renew a surveillance law that lets the FBI read Americans' private communications without asking a judge? Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act expires on April 30. Intelligence agencies want an 18-month clean extension — no changes, no reforms, no warrant requirement. The intelligence community has joined former Biden administration officials in making the rounds on Capitol Hill, pressing members of Congress to fall in line.
Some of us are standing up for the Fourth Amendment by demanding, at the very least, fair votes on real civil liberties protections. Some are not, demanding that we shut up and not only reauthorize this powerful spying power, but also deny Americans a chance to see how their representatives in Congress vote on an issue that enjoys overwhelming, bipartisan support from their constituents.
Conservatives who believe January 6 defendants were treated unjustly by a politicized Department of Justice should be the first to demand a warrant requirement — because Section 702 is one of the laws that was wrongly used to go after those Americans.
Here's what a "clean" reauthorization actually means. The government collects the communications of foreign targets overseas — emails, texts, calls. That part is unobjectionable. Foreigners have no Fourth Amendment rights. The problem is what happens next. When those foreign targets communicate with Americans, those American messages get swept into the database too — hundreds of millions of them. And then the FBI can search through those communications using your name or email address — with no warrant, no judge, and no probable cause. This is the "backdoor search." This is not a hypothetical concern. In a single reporting period, the government conducted 278,000 searches that violated the rules. From 2018 to 2024, federal law required a warrant before the FBI could conduct backdoor searches in certain criminal cases. The bureau ran dozens of qualifying searches during that window. It obtained the required court order zero times.
Conservatives who believe January 6 defendants were treated unjustly by a politicized Department of Justice should be the first to demand a warrant requirement — because Section 702 is one of the laws that was wrongly used to go after those Americans.
RELATED: GOP hard-liners derail government's spying power despite pressure from Trump
Congress responded in 2024 by passing minor reforms that mostly codified then-current practice — RISAA — which is to say Congress put into law the same rules that had already led to significant misuse. The FBI's response was to quietly use a separate querying tool that bypassed those requirements. By March 2026, the FISA Court issued a classified opinion that found the issue spanned the entire intelligence community. And it isn’t just the FBI. We still don’t know whether the NSA analyst who searched Section 702 data for information about online dating matches kept his security clearance or job.
The fix is straightforward. Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) has introduced the Protect Liberty and End Warrantless Surveillance Act, while Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), Rep. Warren Davidson (R-Ohio), and a bipartisan coalition have introduced the Government Surveillance Reform Act, both of which require a warrant before the FBI can access an American's private communications collected under Section 702. Conservative members blocked the clean reauthorization not to make FISA reauthorization impossible, but to create a path forward for a version that does not unjustly violate Americans’ privacy.
The argument that we must choose between national security and the warrant requirement is false. Warrants do not prevent surveillance. They require the government to convince a judge that the surveillance is justified, as the Constitution requires. Government agencies that cannot meet that standard are fishing — for you.
Trump does shocking about-face on spying power weaponized against him and other Americans, now calls it 'VITAL'
President Donald Trump implored GOP lawmakers on Tuesday to "UNIFY" in support of an 18-month extension of a particular spying power that, while ostensibly limited to foreigners, has already been weaponized against American citizens — including Trump.
The warrantless surveillance authority of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was both used to spy on Trump's 2016 campaign and exploited in recent years by the FBI hundreds of thousands of times to spy on U.S. citizens. However, Trump has now determined that it is presently "right for our Country" and needed by the military.
Background
Section 702 is a provision of FISA enacted by Congress in 2008 that enables the state to spy on foreign nationals located outside the U.S. with the compelled aid of electronic communication service providers. The surveillance is authorized programmatically such that the government doesn't have to bother seeking a court-authorized warrant for every person it targets.
'Do what is right for our Country.'
Although individuals targeted under 702 are supposed to be foreign nationals believed to be outside the U.S., the FBI has acknowledged that "such targets may send an email or have a phone call with a U.S. person," resulting in the warrantless surveillance of American citizens.
Numerous Republicans, including Sens. Josh Hawley (Mo.) and Mike Lee (Utah), were especially critical of Section 702 after the FBI admitted there had been 278,000 "unintentional" backdoor search queries of the 702 database for the private communications of Americans between 2020 and 2021 alone.
Jan. 6 protesters, donors to a congressional campaign, and BLM protesters were among the American citizens subjected to the warrantless searches.
New circumstances
Trump, who advocated in 2024 for killing FISA, said on Tuesday that he was working with House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and other Republicans to "get a clean extension of FISA 702 through the House of Representatives this week."
RELATED: 'Clear abuse': Appellate court thwarts Judge Boasberg's plan to investigate top Trump officials
The president noted that he "was a victim of the worst and most illegal abuse of FISA in our Nation's History, by Radical Left Lunatics, who lied to the FISA Court to spy on my 2016 President Campaign in their attempt to RIG the Election in favor of Crooked Hillary Clinton. Their use of this instrument in the 2020 President was even worse!"
"When the Dirty Cop, James Comey, the failed Head of the FBI, went after me, he was using FISA Title I, the Domestic Collection, not FISA 702, the Foreign Collection, which needs to be extended to," continued Trump.
The Obama FBI utilized FISA Title I authority to target the 2016 Trump campaign during the bureau's Crossfire Hurricane frame-up.
The FBI submitted multiple applications to authorize FISA surveillance of Carter Page, a U.S. citizen then serving as an adviser to Trump. The applications that were approved were loaded with "17 significant inaccuracies and omissions," according to the U.S. Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General.
Trump acknowledged that FISA authority has been used against him in the past and may be weaponized against him in the future but stressed that he is "willing to risk that as a Citizen in order to do what is right for our Country."
According to the president, the military "desperately needs FISA 702, and it is one of the reasons we have had such tremendous SUCCESS on the battlefield, both in Venezuela and Iran."
"The fact is, whether you like FISA or not, it is extremely important to our Military," continued Trump. "I have spoken to many Generals about this, and they consider it VITAL."
Trump's Tuesday message greatly resembles a Truth Social message he shared last month, in which he also said that he wanted "the Critical and Common Sense Reforms that were made in the last Reauthorization of FISA" to "remain intact to protect the American People from abuses."
The House Rules Committee advanced a clean extension of the surveillance powers on Tuesday, setting the stage for a floor vote on extending Section 702 ahead of the April 20 deadline, reported The Hill.
While some Republican critics of Section 702 have reversed their stances like the president in light of the reforms added to the provision, it remains unclear if Johnson presently has the votes to see it pass. Politico reported that several GOP lawmakers are planning to vote "no."
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