Congress is intent on reauthorizing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) before it expires on April 19th. It is equally intent on renewing the law without rewriting it to prevent political abuse of the FBI’s authority under the law.

Everyone who has been paying the least attention knows the recent history of FISA and how the FBI abused its powers under FISA to accuse former president Trump and his 2016 campaign of collusion with Russia. (READ MORE from Jed Babbin: Biden Is Morally Bankrupt)

The Washington Times, in a tough December 13th editorial titled “FBI’s assurances no longer cut it in an age of politicized intelligence,” catalogued those abuses. The editorial concluded that FISA’s Section 702 (about which more later) should be repealed because the FBI, including its leadership, is untrustworthy with the powers FISA gives.

On Thursday afternoon last week, FBI Director Christopher Wray testified to the House Appropriations Committee urging that they pass a budget increase for the FBI and the reauthorization of FISA. Cong. Mike Garcia (R-Cal) told Wray to his face, “I don’t trust you,” citing a lack of transparency and his relative silence on the border mess President Biden has created.

The preceding Friday former president Trump, on his “Truth Social” forum, wrote, “KILL FISA, IT WAS ILLEGALLY USED AGAINST ME, AND MANY OTHERS. THEY SPIED ON MY CAMPAIGN!!!” For Trump, it’s all about him and not about what our intelligence community can or should do. All Trump accomplished was to make Senate Republicans angry.

Adhering to what Trump said, several Republicans joined with Democrats to kill the rule under which the FISA reauthorization would be debated. The reauthorization bill was finally passed on Friday, extending the law for two years instead of the usual five.

At issue was the addition of an amendment that would have required the FBI to get a search warrant before making any search of the many databases the FBI uses for information on any American. The FBI opposes that amendment, as did Cong. Mike Turner (R-Oh), chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence — whose FISA “reform” bill didn’t reform anything important — saying it would slow the FBI’s searches down too greatly.

Too *#@*&!  bad. The Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable search and seizure wasn’t written for the FBI’s convenience.

Today, a motion for reconsideration may enable the House Republican rebels to pass that amendment. They probably won’t succeed but they should.

I have been writing, since May 2023 ( see, for example, here and here) that FISA needs to be rewritten to prevent it being abused again — as it was in the “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation of Trump and his campaign. Those columns expressed the opinion that unless FISA is reformed in that way, it should be allowed to lapse.

There are too many FBI abuses of FISA to catalogue here. A few – the false affidavits filed with the FISA Court to get the Carter Page warrants, the FBI Agent Kevin Kleinsmith falsifying and rewriting an email in support of those warrants and much more — indicate that Garcia was right in saying he doesn’t trust Christopher Wray.

FISA was originally written by my old friend, retired Sen. Christopher Bond (R-Mo), to provide the means for surveilling foreign nations and terrorist groups meaning harm to our country. It has been proved, time and again, to be highly effective.

FISA was partially re-written in the post-9-11 “Patriot Act.” The Patriot Act added what now is the problem: Section 702 of FISA which has been abused by the FBI too many times to count.

Section 702 enables the collection, use, and dissemination of all electronic communications that pass through U.S. equipment including telephone, email, and texts. The only real restriction on it is that the communication needs to be with a foreign person on one end and that the purpose of the intercept is to collect foreign intelligence information. The collection of information on any “U.S. person” — a person legally in the U.S. or a U.S. company — is subject to “minimization” procedures which are meant to dispose of the data.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La) passed a bill that won’t reform FISA, but pretends to. According to a Wall Street Journal report, “the bill sharply reduces the amount of Federal Bureau of Investigation personnel who can conduct U.S. searches, creates criminal penalties for abuse, bars the FBI from searching the database solely for evidence of a crime rather than a national-security purpose, mandates more auditing of the program, and codifies other changes already internally adopted at the FBI.” (READ MORE: Biden Does Nothing for Americans Held Abroad)

In short, Johnson’s bill leaves too much discretion to the FBI and doesn’t include the most critical reform: to get FISA out of politics. As I explained in the columns above, it is necessary to prevent FISA — and the FBI and the FISA court, which operates necessarily in secret — from considering surveillance warrants that target federal or statewide incumbent officials and candidates.

Unless that is done, the bill fails to accomplish anything that will prevent another abuse like the FBI’s “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation. And it fails in precisely that manner.

FISA already prohibits targeting U.S. citizens on any surveillance warrants. That, too, failed. Trump campaign official Carter Page was targeted on the false ground that he was a Russian agent.

Johnson’s two-year extension of FISA intends to give Trump a shot at further reforms if he defeats Biden in November. That’s too much to bet on a hope.

There’s really no chance that Congress will suddenly become serious about FISA reforms and change the law the way it needs to be changed.

FISA is, we are told, an essential intelligence tool that helps protect us against foreign espionage and terrorism. I believe it does. But the evidence proves that the FBI cannot be trusted with its powers without rewriting the law to prevent it from once again engaging in political abuse.