Trump muddies FISA reform so he can position himself as saviour at a later date

Republicans were right to sound the alarms back in 2018 that the FISA system was broken, but the president is holding up a bill with overwhelming bipartisan support that aims to fix those problems, writes US political correspondent Griffin Connolly

Donald Trump has railed against FISA abuse for years and is now holding up a bill that aims to fix the broken system. (Photo courtesy Getty Images) (Getty)

It’s a common theme throughout the first three years of Donald Trump’s presidency: Congressional leaders reach a fragile bipartisan agreement on a politically weighty piece of legislation, the president fires off a few tweets opposing it, and the compromise shatters into 535 pieces.

That’s all it took — one tweet — for Mr Trump to torpedo nearly three months of negotiating on a bill that would reauthorise three key national security surveillance provisions along with a host of measures intended to shore up the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) that has faced intense scrutiny from Republicans over the last two years.

“If the FISA Bill is passed tonight on the House floor, I will quickly VETO it. Our Country has just suffered through the greatest political crime in its history. The massive abuse of FISA was a big part of it!” the president tweeted, alluding to the convoluted “Obamagate” conspiracy theory that even he does not seem to have a total grasp on.

It’s unclear exactly what Mr Trump so vehemently opposes about the latest version of the bill.

Most of it was negotiated by his own attorney general and his top allies in the House to rectify many of the highlighted problems with the oft-maligned FISA apparatus.

Based on the fact that the House version passed by a bipartisan vote of 278-136 in March and an amended Senate version that provides even more civil protections passed 80-16 last month, most lawmakers feel it accomplishes just that.

Among the reforms in the bill Mr Trump scuttled last week are measures that:

• require each agency that submits warrant applications to the FISA court to appoint a new compliance officer to help ensure accuracy and proper procedures. The compliance officer will conduct “routine audits” to protect the integrity of the FISA warrant process;
• require agencies to provide the House and Senate Intelligence Committees with all requested information about warrants and applications in a timely manner;
• expand when FISA court judges must appoint an outside expert to scrutinize the government’s warrant applications and pen amici curiae;
• increase the penalties for intelligence agents who knowingly commit malfeasance in the FISA warrant application process, such as intentionally misrepresenting key facts;
• require investigators who are applying to surveil a US person to provide a description of the investigative techniques used to compile key facts in their application;
• require the written approval of the attorney general on any warrant application that targets a federal lawmaker or a candidate for federal office.

The fact is, it doesn’t really matter what fixes the House and Senate come up with when they go to conference later this month to hash out their differences and produce something Mr Trump can support.

As long as they come up with something — no matter how marginal or insignificant the changes — Mr Trump can claim the role of victorious hardball tactician.

He’ll tell his supporters he stood up to the DC establishment, sign the new bill, and walk away with another contrived political victory that may or may not have been worth the extra weeks of negotiation.

With all three House Democrats assigned to the reconciliation conference having previously served as impeachment managers for Mr Trump’s Senate trial earlier this year — Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff, Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler, and House Administration Chairwoman Zoe Lofgren — it’s anyone’s guess how long these negotiations could take.

The biggest issue negotiators may confront is that it’s unclear exactly what else Mr Trump wants.

His criticisms of the bill are characteristically threadbare and mostly centre on his rage over how his campaign was mistreated by Obama-era intelligence officials, a claim that has not been substantiated.

The bill he threatened to veto last week received the endorsement in March of his own attorney general, William Barr, along with top Trump allies in the House such as Congressmen Doug Collins and Jim Jordan, the former and current top Republicans on the Judiciary Committee, respectively.

Mr Jordan admitted at the time that the bill did not “go far enough” on some privacy concerns but that it did “represent real reform” of the FISA application process that Republicans have argued, accurately, was prone to sloppiness and errors.

Mr Jordan, House Intelligence ranking member Devin Nunes and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy all voted for the FISA reform bill on the House floor in March before abruptly turning on it after Mr Trump’s veto threat.

The evidence is overwhelming, at this point, that Republicans were right to sound the alarms back in 2018 that the FISA system was broken, even if their claims that political bias influenced such rampant malpractice remain unproven conjecture.

In March, DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz released an interim report from his audit of 29 past FISA warrant applications that found errors and discrepancies in each one.

The applications averaged roughly 20 errors, with some having as many as 65.

That report confirmed what Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham has been saying for years about the need for FISA reform (even if it does not substantiate his claims about political bias).

Mr Graham’s vote in favour of the Senate FISA bill that Mr Trump sank last week indicated that it should have been enough to ameliorate most FISA hawks’ concerns.

But the political machinations that guide most of Mr Trump’s decisions compelled him to manufacture a drawn out process so he could present himself as the hero of a FISA reform process that he himself muddied at the last second.