Dan Crenshaw@DanCrenshawTX
Let’s be clear. Your position is aligned (and cosponsored) with the progressive caucus - Jerry Nadler, AOC, Rashida Tlaib, Pramila Jayapal - the list goes on and on. It is the far left socialists that want this same policy.
President Trump reauthorized this important program in 2018.
The only difference? Our new bill actually FIXES the abuses by the FBI and prevents Crossfire Hurricane from ever happening again!
The new FISA reforms we put in this bill are DIRECTLY targeted at the FBI scumbags who illegally targeted the Trump campaign in 2016 with Crossfire Hurricane. That’s the truth.
What the progressives want to do is much more than just fix the program, they want to kill it entirely. I’m not surprised when Rashida Tlaib wants to make it easier for terrorists to kill Americans, but I am VERY surprised that many Republicans agree with her.
Do not be fooled by the rhetoric around this “warrant requirement” amendment. You already have to get a warrant to access ANY American’s data.
The amendment they’re pushing would require an additional warrant just to check if a person inside the US (whether an illegal alien or a US citizen) is in a database of legally collected, warrant-approved communications of FOREIGN targets.
When you search that database, you don’t have access to any American’s inbox, texts, etc. You only see if they’ve been in contact with a foreign terrorist, a foreign intelligence officer or a foreign government official, etc.
This is a key point. Think of a typical wire tap for criminal investigations. You need a warrant to wire tap someone’s phone calls. You don’t pretend to ignore the people they call or the content of those conversations. It becomes part of a typical criminal investigation.
By the way, FISA requires a warrant even to wire tap foreign terrorists abroad.
But what do terrorists do? THEY PLAN TERROR ATTACKS ON THE HOMELAND. How do they plan it? They talk about people and places inside the United States! Obviously. So of course there are communications with people inside the US collected in this database. The only difference between your classic phone wire tap and FISA is that FISA has a searchable database.
So if you can’t even search the database for American people and places that these terrorists have been talking to (or targeting), then how will we figure out what their plans are? We can’t.
The progressives will say, “yes but we allow it in cases of imminent threat.”
Obviously they’ve never tracked terrorists.
You can’t know if there’s an imminent threat if you’re not allowed to see the conversations from the wire tap you already legally obtained with a warrant. Terrorists don’t openly email their plans, obviously. Instead, they say “hey let’s meet at location X, or let’s sign up for flying lessons at this local airport.”
Well ok, can’t you just get a warrant on the people or places they talk about, assuming we hire 2,000 more Biden-appointed judges to go through those warrant requests? No. Because simple association between two entities is not enough to get a warrant on probable cause.
This is why we say this requirement - while perhaps well intentioned - would actually destroy our ability to detect domestic terror attacks (or drug trafficking, or espionage), because it prevents our investigators from moving past step 1 of the investigation process, which is simply connecting the dots with data we already legally have.
