House Intelligence Chair Mike Turner is calling on Biden to make public a "serious national security threat." Turner stated the U.S. is aware of a "highly concerning and destabilizing" Russian military capability. Turner's claim has sparked fear and confusion, amongst colleagues and constituents.
Congressman Matt Gaetz is speaking out against the claim that the said threat is anything unusual or even credible. Gaetz has expressed concern that Turner's motive in making the announcement is actually a plot to help pass the national security supplement and extend the FISA authorities.
"The timing of this 'national seciurty threat' is suspicious. I worry that it will be used as a basis to extend the FISA authorities that have been abused by the Biden Administration. There is nothing I read in the intelligence yesterday that scares me more than the intelligence I review about our open southern border," Gaetz said.
Congress has a deadline of April 19th to reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, also known as FISA. This law, originally intended to make it easier for the government to monitor foreign terrorists, has been repeatedly abused and used to illegally spy on Americans. Section 207 allows the government to collect from American companies like Google and AT&T, the communications of foreigners abroad, without a warrant for intelligence purposes. Declassified documents have revealed that officials have performed baseless backdoor searches for the private communications of members of Congress, journalists, crime victims, and political donors.
After initial abuse findings, Presiding Judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, Rudolph Contreras said that, "Compliance problems with the F.B.I. 's querying of Section 702 information has proven to be persistent and widespread."
The investigation discovered that F.B.I. officials ran queries of people suspected of involvement in the January 6 riot at the Capitol. One line discussed “three batch queries consisting of approximately 23,132 separate queries” presumed to be Americans. Another notable incident of abuse is a batch query that was conducted for over 19,000 donors to a congressional campaign. While the F.B.I. claimed the campaign was the target of a foreign influence operation, the Justice Department’s national security division “determined that only eight identifiers used in the query had sufficient ties to foreign influence activities to comply with the querying standard.”
The F.B.I. was forced to undergo compliance changes in order to proceed with the program in April of 2022. Many lawmakers agree that these reforms are not significant enough to protect the American people from future abuse and grave privacy violations.
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