…Meanwhile, Congress was set to take up proposed reforms to Section 702 of FISA that would put an end to warrantless spying on Americans. The intelligence agencies and the White House have been very clear about their opposition to those reforms and that they would very much like to keep spying on Americans without having to obtain a warrant. They’ve been using the press to pressure Congress to scrap the reforms. On Tuesday, the FBI shared newly declassified information with Politico revealing it used Section 702 to foil a terrorist plot on U.S. soil last year — a none-too-subtle suggestion that if they had to bother with getting a warrant, they wouldn’t be able to stop these kind of terrorist plots.
What happened next is telling. Even though the House Republicans who were pushing for the FISA reforms appeared to be winning the debate, in the aftermath of the hysteria over Russia nukes in space, Speaker Johnson pulled the bill and canceled Congress for the rest of the week.
It doesn’t take a conspiracy theorist to figure out what happened here. Our intelligence agencies don’t want lawmakers getting in the way of their plans. They don’t want any interruption in the flow of U.S. tax dollars to Ukraine, and they don’t want any curbs on their ability to spy on Americans.
The irony here is that the U.S. intelligence community itself has become a far greater threat to our republic than Russia or any other country. As journalists Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi, and Alex Gutentag reported Tuesday, the CIA asked foreign intelligence agencies to spy on more than two dozen Trump associates as early as 2015 and share the intelligence they acquired. This surveillance operation would later be used to launch the Crossfire Hurricane investigation and craft the Russia-collusion hoax.