Trump’s veto threat throws surveillance bill into chaos
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump suggested on Thursday that he might veto a bipartisan surveillance bill, potentially disrupting an agreement to resolve a debate over national security and privacy before three FBI tools for investigating terrorism and espionage expire Sunday.
“Many Republican Senators want me to Veto the FISA Bill until we find out what led to, and happened with, the illegal attempted ‘coup’ of the duly elected President of the United States, and others!” Trump wrote on Twitter.
Trump’s comments came a day after the House passed a bipartisan bill to extend the expiring tools while also adding safeguards to national-security wiretapping under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA.
Several of the president’s most vocal allies backed the legislation, and Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., the majority leader, enthusiastically urged swift passage of the House’s bill.
The president did not explain whether he was suggesting that he might not sign the bill — negotiated this week by Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California, the House Republican leader — or a short-term extension that Republican senators were contemplating.
But the intervention showed that Trump remains an unpredictable and volatile decisionmaker on surveillance legal policy. Republicans in the House thought they had assurances from the White House that Trump would sign their bill before they voted.
If Trump does derail the effort by congressional leaders of both parties to get some kind of bill passed by Sunday, the FBI would at least temporarily lose three powers that lawmakers created after the Sept. 11 attacks. They include the authority to get a court order for business records that are relevant to a terrorism or espionage investigation.
Trump and his supporters are invested in promulgating a conspiracy theory that the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into Russia’s efforts to manipulate the 2016 presidential election was actually a politically motivated attempt to sabotage his presidency, not a legitimate attempt to understand a foreign power’s interference in American democracy.
An investigation by the Justice Department’s independent inspector general, Michael Horowitz, concluded that the Russia investigation had a lawful basis and found no evidence that its opening was politically motivated.
Horowitz did, however, uncover serious errors and omissions in one aspect of the inquiry: investigators’ applications for permission from the FISA court to wiretap Carter Page, a former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser with many links to Russian officials.
None of the expiring tools was involved in the Page applications. But the legislation to extend them has become a vehicle for Congress to respond to the inspector general’s findings. The House bill, for example, would push the FISA court to appoint an outsider to critique the government’s arguments when a wiretap application raised serious issues about First Amendment activity, which could include political campaigns.
Even before Trump’s Twitter remark, it was uncertain whether the House’s rewrite could pass the Senate in time to prevent the expiring FBI tools from temporarily lapsing. Under Senate rules, senators can express their displeasure by slowing legislation moving through the chamber for days, though not stopping it.
In this case, Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, was threatening to use procedural tools to prevent passage before the Senate leaves for a weeklong recess because he does not believe the House’s language sufficiently protects Americans’ civil liberties from government spying.
Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., another critic of government surveillance, wrote on Twitter that he would “continue to stand” with Trump in opposition to party leaders “trying to ram through fake FISA amendments without any real changes.”