Nearly 150 House Republicans voted to extend a surveillance act on Thursday that Donald Trump claimed was used to “surveil and abuse” his 2016 presidential election campaign.
The annual Defense authorization bill to unlock $886 billion in Pentagon funding has now made its way through Congress and will appear before President Joe Biden to be signed into law. Included in the bill was a measure extending Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) until the middle of April.
FISA allows U.S. intelligence agencies to intercept communications involving suspected foreign agents and terrorists without a warrant, including any conversations they may have with American nationals. Court documents released this year revealed the FBI had been improperly searching this data for Americans, including individuals suspected of involvement with the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot and Black Lives Matter protests.
In a January 2018 post on Twitter, now X, Trump claimed FISA had been used by the “previous administration and others” to “badly surveil and abuse the Trump campaign.” Less than two hours later, he backed extending the legislation, saying in another post that he’d “personally directed the fix to the unmasking process since taking office.”
House Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene objected to the latest extension in an X post on Monday, saying that FISA had been “greatly abused by the FBI and DOJ and used against Americans instead of foreign nationals violating the 4th amendment,” which guarantees freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures by the state.
Scott Olson/GETTY
The representative from Georgia also wrote that “FISA abuse targeted Trump campaign for Russia Russia Russia LIES” and was allegedly used against “Americans involved in the Jan. 6 and BLM riots.”
She continued: “While we need the ability to stop terrorism in America, abusing FISA to target political enemies should never happen. But if a terrorist attack happens on U.S. soil, every American will blame the Biden regime for allowing 1.8 million got aways in our country including an unknown number of terrorists from all over the world!
“It won’t be because members of congress like me refuse to vote to reauthorize secret spy courts and fund politically weaponized government agencies. The communists who have abused the power of the federal government are the ONLY ones to blame!!!”
Ahead of the vote, Edward Snowden, the former intelligence contractor who leaked highly classified National Security Agency information in 2013, called for House Speaker Mike Johnson to be “dumped just like [Kevin] McCarthy” if FISA was extended as part of the annual defense bill.
On Thursday, 147 Republicans voted to approve the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), including the FISA extension, including several outspoken Trump defenders such as Lauren Boebert and Nancy Mace. Just 73 voted against while Alexander Mooney from West Virginia didn’t vote. Forty-five Democrats also opposed the legislation, though 163 voted to pass it.
One of those who voted against the NDAA was Texas House Republican Chip Roy, who argued there should have been a separate vote on extending the FISA.
He said: “The fact of the matter is what’s being stated is it is impossible to oppose the National Defense Authorization Act because we put a pay raise in it or because we put something in there that is seemingly so important that we have to ignore the critical destruction of our civil liberties by adding FISA extension right on the top of it without doing the forms necessary to protect the American people.”
Uncommon Knowledge
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.