A key vote to advance the reauthorization of a controversial spy tool failed in the House of Representatives on Wednesday after Donald Trump urged his allies to “kill” it.
Nineteen far-right Republicans united to undermine the vote, dealing another blow to Speaker Mike Johnson, who had called on his conference to advance the bill.
The so-called “compromise bill” included new guardrails for the FBI’s “espionage tool” – Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) which expires next week – which hardliners said did not go far enough.
Section 702 of FISA is credited with helping intelligence officials thwart terrorist attacks on U.S. soil, but is also open to abuse by spying on U.S. citizens.
It was used to spy on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page in 2016 when he was suspected of communicating with the Russians.
‘KILL FISA, IT WAS USED ILLEGALLY AGAINST ME AND MANY OTHERS. THEY SPYED ON MY CAMPAIGN!!! DJT’ Trump posted on Truth Social on Wednesday morning.
Nineteen Republicans voted ‘no’ on the rule to advance the reauthorization of Section 702, in a major blow to Speaker Mike Johnson
A key vote to advance the reauthorization of a controversial spy tool failed in the House of Representatives on Wednesday after Donald Trump urged his allies to ‘kill’ it
Section 702 specifically allows the U.S. government to surveil aliens with suspected terrorist ties who are not on U.S. soil, even if the party on the other end of such communications is a U.S. citizen in America.
All Democrats voted ‘no’ on the rule and usually always do so, even if they support the bill, bringing the total vote to 193-228.
It was the seventh regulatory vote to fail this Congress, the fourth under Speaker Mike Johnson.
A rule had not failed in the twenty years before this Congress, because the majority party generally did not resort to such tactics to paralyze business in the House of Representatives.
It was also the speaker’s third attempt to renew and reform FISA, which failed.
Johnson returned to Trump’s message before the vote: “Trump used the information from this program to kill terrorists.”
The speaker claimed that the bill as it stands now “ends the abuses” that occurred in the past under FISA.
He is warned that if the compromise bill fails, the Senate will “block” the House of Representatives with a clean reauthorization without surveillance reforms before FISA expires on April 19.
House Republicans will meet behind closed doors on Wednesday at 4 p.m. to discuss the path forward on FISA.
Johnson could shelve the FISA bill again — meaning he wouldn’t need all of his Republicans to pass a rule, but he would need two-thirds of the House of Representatives to pass a final bill.
This could further confuse Johnson’s opponents and push them into the arms of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s motion to eliminate the threat.
If Greene were to bring her motion to evict to the floor, there would be a vote to oust Johnson from the speakership, which would require only a small handful of Republicans to sign on, if all Democrats were to vote again to pass a Republican speaker to boot.
A senior Republican Party staffer told DailyMail.com that there is a “strong” chance that Republicans would embrace the anti-FISA bill. [MTV] if Johnson were to put the bill back on the floor under suspension.
“Suspending it is another slap in the face to the members who are already thinking about MTV.”
Hardliners on the right and left have become strange comrades over accusations that FISA has trampled on American civil liberties.
They are calling for an amendment that would require intelligence officers to obtain an arrest warrant before picking up communications from U.S. citizens talking to nationals under suspicion.
That amendment pits the Judiciary Committee and its allies against the Intelligence Committee and national security hawks, who say the intelligence community should not get bogged down in obtaining arrest warrants when potential terror plots involve communications with Americans.
If an intelligence officer were to request Section 702 to pick up communications from a suspected terrorist, and they were talking to a US citizen in the United States, they would only be able to see half of the terrorists’ conversation without an order to go to the US to watch. national.
Johnson said he would not force members to vote one way or another on the amendment requirement, but privately told people he opposes it.
The bill passed by the House last week would expand the program while adding new changes intended to strengthen oversight and training and ensure transparency of the program.
Johnson returned to Trump’s message before the vote: ‘Trump used the information from this program to kill terrorists’
It won’t include an amendment from Rep. Warren Davidson, R-Ohio, that would ban federal agencies from buying information about Americans from private data companies, which has rankled conservative hardliners, but leaders said that could be a standalone vote this week to get.
In March, a compromise bill drafted by negotiators from the Judiciary and Intelligence Committees was abruptly removed from the House of Representatives meeting schedule over concerns from the Intel Committee over an amendment that would have forced law enforcement agencies to obtain a warrant before obtaining communications relating to a US citizen.
A May 2023 report detailed how the FBI used Section 702 to “interrogate” (or search) names of individuals suspected of being on Capitol grounds during the January 6, 2021 riot, Black Lives Matters protesters, crime victims and their families, and donors to one congressional campaign.
In total, the FBI abused Section 702 more than 278,000 times, the document shows.
Although many of Section 702’s uses remain secret, intelligence officials leaked late last year that they had used the controversial tool to thwart arms sales to Iran.
The CIA and other intelligence agencies had used information gathered by monitoring the electronic communications of foreign weapons manufacturers and halting several shipments of advanced weapons to Iran.