‘KILL FISA’: Trump Creates New Headache for Speaker Johnson Over Spy-Powers Vote

WASHINGTON—Former President Donald Trump urged lawmakers to not renew an expiring surveillance law that the Biden administration says is critical to protecting national security, creating a new headache for House Speaker Mike Johnson, who is also managing a simmering Republican revolt over Ukraine funding.

Trump, the presumptive 2024 presidential nominee and the most powerful figure in the GOP, weighed in ahead of a planned vote to reauthorize the controversial intelligence power in coming days. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a portion of which is due to expire next week, has animated critics on the left and right for years for how it allows the collection of some American communications without a warrant, and lawmakers have been fighting for months over the program.

“KILL FISA, IT WAS ILLEGALLY USED AGAINST ME, AND MANY OTHERS. THEY SPIED ON MY CAMPAIGN!!!” Trump said in an early-morning post on Truth Social.

A party-line procedural vote related to FISA is planned for Wednesday afternoon. If it fails, the FISA legislation can’t come to the floor for an up or down vote. Given Republicans’ thin 218-213 majority, Johnson can afford to lose only a few GOP votes on the rule.

FISA grants spy agencies broad authority to collect communications from U.S. technology companies that belong to terrorists, spies, hackers and other national-security threats living overseas.

There is no evidence that the specific law at issue, Section 702 of FISA, has been used to spy on Trump or any of his campaigns.

A different section of the law that isn’t due to lapse was used to obtain wiretaps on Trump’s 2016 campaign staffer Carter Page, a move that a Justice Department inspector general later sharply criticized after a litany of errors regarding the surveillance application were uncovered.

Six years ago, Trump made a similar post on social media urging lawmakers to let the law lapse, when it was last up for renewal—in opposition to his own administration’s stance on the issue—before later reversing his stance under pressure from senior officials.

In a meeting with House Republicans Wednesday morning, Johnson argued for renewing and reforming FISA, saying it is critically important to protecting the American people from terrorism. Johnson said FISA and Section 702 are vital to understanding the threats against the U.S. and to counter adversaries.

In the meeting, Johnson told members that he had spoken with Trump on Tuesday night, according to a lawmaker in the room. Johnson didn’t specify the topic, but the lawmaker took Johnson’s comments as designed to show that the speaker wasn’t on the outs with Trump.

Trump’s post early Wednesday is the latest complication to Johnson’s monthslong effort to forge a path forward on renewing the expiring surveillance law. The Louisiana Republican’s previous efforts have repeatedly faltered in recent months amid sharp disagreements in both parties over whether to enshrine new limits on the spying tool designed to protect Americans’ privacy. With the law set to expire on April 19, Johnson had already been facing an uncertain path forward even before Trump’s missive.

Rep. Max Miller (R., Ohio) said he expects Trump’s comments to have an impact on House Republicans.

“When Trump puts out a statement like that, people get scared. They’ll vote no, and then they can have an easy weekend” in their home districts “as opposed to getting grilled,” Miller said.

The former president’s involvement comes at a particularly difficult time for Johnson, who is living in the shadow of a threat by one of his fellow House Republicans to oust him.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R., Ga.) filed a motion to remove Johnson from the speakership late last month, after Johnson relied on Democrats to help pass a $1.2 trillion spending package to fund most of the government for the rest of the fiscal year. But Greene has yet to take the next step of calling her motion up, which would force a vote within two legislative days. In a letter to her Republican colleagues on Tuesday, Greene warned Johnson against reauthorizing FISA without including a requirement that a warrant be obtained before searching the data of Americans swept up by FISA surveillance.

“Mike Johnson does not have the support of the conference.…He’s in there urging members to reauthorize FISA, and I don’t think he has the votes for it right now is what I’m gathering,” Greene said Wednesday after the GOP meeting.

“How he handles the FISA process and how he handles funding Ukraine is going to tell our entire conference how to handle the motion to vacate,” she added.

Johnson has repeatedly sought to strike a compromise between two factions within his own party who are deeply at odds over the spying law—as are Democrats—only to postpone votes to avoid a potentially brutal showdown on the House floor.

The House was expected to vote on reauthorizing the spying power this week. The House Rules Committee on Tuesday approved a rule setting the terms for considering FISA and three other bills on the floor. The rule would allow votes on six amendments, including a bipartisan one that would prohibit warrantless searches of Americans’ communications in the FISA 702 database, “with exceptions for imminent threats to life or bodily harm, consent searches, or known cybersecurity threat signatures.”

Senior Biden administration officials have said such an imposition would cripple significant functions of the program and endanger American lives.

Section 702 of FISA allows the U.S. to track the electronic communications of terrorists, spies and hackers overseas that route through U.S. technology firms like AT&T and Alphabet. Though intended to collect conversations from suspected national security threats located overseas, the program ensnares an unknown volume of private communications that belong to Americans, such as when someone is communicating—wittingly or not—with a surveilled suspect.

The Biden administration has for over a year been aggressively lobbying lawmakers in both parties to renew the surveillance power. National security officials say it is their most important tool used to disrupt terrorist plots, fend off nation-state cyberattacks and glean insights into the ambitions of China, Russia and other adversaries.

Reviews of the program over the years have found repeated faults in how American data has been accessed by analysts at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, prompting a series of internal procedural changes designed to improve compliance. The House bill codifies those changes and adopts some other privacy measures, but critics say that absent a warrant requirement it does too little to protect Americans from intrusive surveillance.

The 702 program contributes to 59% of all intelligence delivered to President Biden in his daily brief, officials have said. For example, FBI officials disclosed to reporters earlier this year that Section 702 was instrumental to identifying Chinese hackers’ entry into U.S. critical infrastructure, which officials warned could lead to crippling cyberattacks that threaten American lives in the event of a conflict with Beijing over Taiwan.

Absent congressional action, the law will expire in April. But Johnson may have an out, as some experts and critics of the program in Congress say it could potentially continue for another year due to how and when the secretive court that oversees the program grants annual approval for the categories of intelligence collection it allows. Such a continuation of the program would almost certainly be met with legal challenges, a complexity that Biden administration officials have said they want to avoid.

Siobhan Hughes contributed to this article.

Write to Dustin Volz at [email protected] and Lindsay Wise at [email protected]