Extending a contentious wiretap law was going to be a hard sell with Republicans before Mar-a-Lago. Now, it’s looking nightmarish.
GOP fury stoked by the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago is about to upend a long-running fight over intelligence agencies’ surveillance powers.
Republicans are warning that the search of Donald Trump’s Florida residence is throwing an early curveball into reauthorization of a program known on the Hill as Section 702. Meant to gather electronic communications of foreign targets, it has caused no shortage of controversy over the years given its ability to also inadvertently sweep up the communications of Americans.
“When you have actions like this,” House Intelligence Committee member Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.), said in a brief interview, referring to the FBI search of the former president, “for a lot of people it’s feeding into suspicions that they may have. And we’re trying to get past all of that. We have our work cut out for us.”
Fitzpatrick, a centrist who breaks from Trump at times and is working on reauthorizing the program, predicted that the search of the former president’s estate would have a “ripple effect” on the debate because it feeds GOP doubts about the top ranks of the FBI.
Greenlighting future Section 702 surveillance was never going to be easy in a GOP with long-running fractures over the often-sweeping scope of law enforcement and intelligence monitoring, as illustrated by brawls on the matter in 2018 and 2020. While Congress has until the end of 2023 to act on a program that the FBI and others have argued is critical to national security, House Republicans said in interviews that they’ve already started talking about it as they prepare for a likely majority next year.
“It complicates it a lot,” Rep. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.), another Intelligence Committee member and the frontrunner to succeed retiring Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.), said about the search’s impact on the surveillance fight.
Importantly, there’s no evidence of any connection thus far between the FBI’s Mar-a-Lago search and warrantless surveillance. But Republicans argue the FBI’s actions toward Trump feed their broader wariness about a string of recent decisions by bureau and Justice Department leadership. That caution would spill into any debate next year on Section 702.
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GOP fury stoked by the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago is about to upend a long-running fight over intelligence agencies’ surveillance powers.https://t.co/77c93JIrcU
— POLITICO (@politico) August 19, 2022
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