FISA: Trump rails against 'warrantless surveillance' that he himself reauthorised in 2018
Donald Trump railed against "warrantless surveillance" of US citizens this week as Democrats and Republicans headed back to the drawing board on negotiations to reauthorise key elements of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) that lapsed in March.
"WARRANTLESS SURVEILLANCE OF AMERICANS IS WRONG!" the president tweeted in all caps on Wednesday.
But Mr Trump himself reauthorised such intelligence tools in January 2018 when he signed into law a bill re-upping the National Security Agency’s (NSA) warrantless internet surveillance programme.
At the time, Mr Trump said the NSA programme was a "critically important national security tool" to foil terrorist plots, illicit weapons sales, and other malign actors.
The NSA's warrantless surveillance programme, extended for six years by Congress and Mr Trump in 2018 as part of a FISA reauthorisation that year, collects information and intercepts communications from foreigners without their knowledge. But sometimes intelligence operatives end up trawling US citizens' communications in the process.
"In order to detect and prevent attacks before they happen, we must be able to intercept the communications of foreign targets who are reasonably believed to possess foreign intelligence information," Mr Trump said .
The covert NSA surveillance programme "has proven to be among the Nation’s most effective foreign intelligence tools," he said, adding that it has "enabled our Intelligence Community to disrupt numerous plots against our citizens at home and our warfighters abroad" and "unquestionably saved American lives."
Since signing the 2018 FISA reauthoristion, Mr Trump has grown increasingly wary of the intelligence community's wide-ranging surveillance authorities.
The president and congressional Republicans have seized on a 2019 report by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz that found the FBI committed multiple errors in 2016 on their applications for FISA warrants to surveil former Trump campaign aide Carter Page.
While Mr Page no longer worked for the Trump campaign by the time the courts approved the warrant to monitor his communications, Republicans have argued that such abuse of the FISA system warrants considerable reform.
The Republican chairmen of three Senate committees are investigating the so-far unsubstantiated claims that Obama administration officials intentionally abused surveillance laws to politically undermine Mr Trump's 2016 campaign and beset his incoming administration with lengthy investigations into possible ties between Mr Trump's aides and Russia.
The president's key allies in the House on intelligence matters — ex-House Judiciary ranking member Doug Collins, current House Judiciary ranking member Jim Jordan, and others — reached a deal with Democrats months ago on a package to reauthorise lapsing FISA elements with certain reforms, civil protections, and legal reviews. The Senate kicked it back to the House last week along with an amendment from Senators Mike Lee, Republican of Utah, and Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, that offered more civil and legal protections for those subject to surveillance.
Mr Trump effectively scuttled that deal this week by threatening to veto it.
The House and Senate will go to conference to settle their differences and craft legislation the president will sign or that is veto-proof, Speaker Nancy Pelosi wrote in a letter to Democrats on Thursday.
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