Rep. Jim Himes (D-CT), the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, spent last year warning Americans about Donald Trump’s “creeping authoritarianism.” Now he is scrambling alongside Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) to hand the Trump administration a clean extension of one of the federal government’s most sweeping domestic surveillance authorities while working to obscure its abuses. Worse, he is blatantly lying about playing any role in that effort at all.
That law, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, was first enacted in 2008 when Congress voted to retroactively authorize a secret warrantless surveillance program constructed under the George W. Bush administration and exposed by the New York Times in 2005. Under the pretext of targeting foreigners abroad, it has become a vehicle for unconstitutional, warrantless backdoor searches of Americans’ private communications. The FBI conducts up to 3.4 million illegal backdoor queries in a single year.
Last Friday, three days before the program’s April 20 sunset date, a House vote on clean renewal failed, despite a full-court press from the White House, when 20 Republicans joined most Democrats to block reauthorization. The spy powers only survived on a 15-day temporary extension that expires on April 30.
As POLITICO reported, Himes is on a “mission” to save those spy powers, and has been “empowered by House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries” to lobby skeptical Democrats on reauthorization, reportedly engaging in direct contacts with the White House to pull it off, a role Himes now denies. A leaked email produced by the journalist Daniel Schuman from Himes’s deputy general counsel, John Laufer, urged House Democrats to vote “yes” for Mike Johnson’s five-year extension of the program.
“The only thing I have ‘been working to advance’ is the next package of reforms,” Himes replied on X Saturday to Schuman, who accused the Connecticut democrat of “working to advance legislation that undercuts civil liberties protections” and “empowers a very dangerous president to spy on Americans without a warrant.”
But those “reforms” Himes claimed to be working to advance are reforms in name only, say experts on the legislation like Elizabeth Goitein of the Brennan Center for Justice and Patrick Eddington of the Cato Institute.
That “main ‘reform,’” wrote Goitein, was “a provision that merely restated existing law, under which the government may not ‘target’ Americans under Section 702.” The provision was titled a “warrant requirement,” Goitein explained, “even though it imposed no new warrant requirement whatsoever.” Further, she wrote, that reform “had zero relevance to the issue at the heart of the debate over Section 702, namely, backdoor searches,” the practice that allows three letter agencies to query databases of Americans’ communications swept up under the program without ever obtaining a warrant.
It’s “a bag of garbage with a bunch of glitter,” Eddington told The American Conservative.
But Himes’s quest to hand the Trump administration a clean reauthorization of unconstitutional warrantless surveillance powers has involved not just misleading colleagues about the nature of the reforms but also blatantly lying about whether there were ever any abuses to reform in the first place.
In an interview with POLITICO this week, Himes made the sweeping claim that in the last 14 months, there has “not been a single example of their attempt to abuse this database” and that “there is no program that is more overseen than this one. None.”
Eddington tells TAC that there is no possible way for Jim Himes to make that broad of an assessment.
“Does Himes expect everyone to believe that he’s visited every FBI field office, been given unfettered access to SENTINEL and the 702 database at every location, and conducted his own forensic audit of FBI 702 compliance?” asked Eddington. “It doesn’t pass the laugh test.”
Further, a FISA Court (FISC) opinion reviewed by Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) and a secret government interpretation of FISA law reviewed by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), who warned colleagues it revealed compliance problems that should cause “every American should be concerned,” cast the assertion into question. According to Massie, who has seen the court opinion but cannot disclose it due to harsh secrecy laws, the FBI and other intelligence agencies are using “an innovative loophole to spy on Americans in ways that [he] could not even tell” Americans because “the interpretation of the law” itself is “top secret.”
It is not the first time that FISA courts, which rubber-stamp nearly every wiretap request the government brings before them, have sounded alarms over their own program’s abuses. A 2022 FISA Court opinion found an FBI analyst had queried the Section 702 database to run a batch search on over 19,000 donors to a congressional campaign, with the Justice Department determining “only eight identifiers used in the query had sufficient ties to foreign influence activities to comply with querying standard.”
Among those leading the fight for reforms is Massie, who has been sending members into the SCIF to review the classified FISA Court opinion for themselves. Massie has also teamed up with Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) to introduce the Surveillance Accountability Act, targeting the government’s broader surveillance architecture; the Section 702 debate, as Massie put it, is “missing the forest for a single tree.” Their bill would require warrants to access data held by internet service providers, banks, and data brokers, and would ban warrantless facial recognition, among other reforms.
Whether or not they are successful depends on the will of other members to break with a president who continues to insist on the national security importance of unconstitutional warrantless surveillance. For the security state and its allies in the Trump administration, Himes remains their most useful Democrat in that fight.
Read the full article here
