A key Republican senator said Tuesday that lawmakers cannot trust the FBI on issues related to warrantless surveillance of Americans because the bureau will not detail its reforms or say whether it has punished violators.

Sen. Mike Lee, Utah Republican, ticked off to FBI Director Christopher B. Wray numerous instances of the FBI illegally using against Americans the nation’s chief spying tool, citing findings from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Mr. Lee asked Mr. Wray at the hearing whether any of the FBI employees who conducted the illegal searches using powers granted under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act were terminated or had their security clearances stripped.

Mr. Wray said he was unaware of the instances Mr. Lee cited, but that they occurred before the bureau installed reforms to rein in abuses of FISA surveillance.

Mr. Lee wasn’t impressed.

“You keep referring to these policies, these new procedures. We haven’t seen that. We’re not even allowed to have access to it,” the Utah Republican noted.

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He added that the nation’s lawmakers “have absolutely no reason to trust you because you haven’t behaved in a manner that’s trustworthy.”

“You can’t even tell me that people who intentionally, knowingly and deliberately violated the civil rights of American citizens, that they were fired, or that they had their security clearance stripped,” Mr. Lee said.

Mr. Lee questioned Mr. Wray at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which is up for reauthorization at the end of the year.

During his questioning of Mr. Wray, Mr. Lee noted that a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court opinion in April 2022 said that searches included one related to 19,000 donors to one particular congressional campaign, which the court didn’t specify.

The court also listed among the names queried, 133 Americans who either participated in the summer 2020 George Floyd protests or who were in the vicinity of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

The Utah Republican also noted that in 2022 the FBI and other agencies searched Americans’ communications over 200,000 times and just 16 searches were only based on evidence of an existing crime.

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Mr. Lee also pressed Mr. Wray on the FBI searching the communications related to the Jan. 6 demonstrators and whether those actions were “crime-only” searches.

“Were the three related batch queries consisting of over 23,000 separate queries relating to the events of January 6. Were those ‘evidence of a crime-only’ queries?” Mr. Lee asked.

Mr. Wray responded that he did not know the answer to that question.

“The answer is no. Were their 141 queries for the activists arrested in connection with the George Floyd protests here in Washington, DC, ‘evidence of a crime-only’ queries?” Mr. Lee pressed.

Mr. Wray replied that “those were non-compliant queries. And, again, they all predate the reforms that we’ve put in place.”

Mr. Lee is among a growing bipartisan contingent of lawmakers who argue the FISA 702 program violates the Fourth Amendment guarantee against unreasonable searches and seizures.

Mr. Wray replied that the courts have consistently upheld Section 702 as constitutional, but Mr. Lee said that was because people usually are unaware their communications were searched by the federal government.

According to a report in September by the government’s Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, tens of thousands queries were executed related to civil unrest and protests from November 2020 to December 2021.

For example, the report found 141 searches for communications of racial justice protesters, 1,600 Americans traveling to or returning from a foreign country, and 2,000 for information about people at an athletic event.

Members in both chambers are hashing out legislation to overhaul the government’s main electronic spying law, proposing new limits on who can access the trove of communications and demanding the FBI get a warrant if it wants to run Americans’ identities through the database.

While most lawmakers on Capitol Hill seem to believe that some changes are necessary, there are competing pieces of legislation among the House Judiciary Committee, House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

While the bills are bipartisan, the biggest difference is the Judiciary bill contains a warrant requirement for any search query in the FISA database of a U.S. person.

Additionally, the Judiciary legislation caps how many people in each FBI field office and at FBI Headquarters who would be eligible to conduct those queries.

A working group led by Rep. Darin LaHood, Illinois Republican and a member of the House intelligence committee, released a plan that would restrict the number of FBI personnel who can authorize a query of a U.S. person and require the FBI to obtain a warrant to conduct a query on Americans if they are only seeking evidence of a crime.

• Kerry Picket can be reached at kpicket@washingtontimes.com.