House pulls bill; Trump had told GOP to vote no

House Democratic leaders on Thursday withdrew legislation that would revive expired FBI tools to investigate terrorism and espionage and add privacy protections for Americans, after a fragile bipartisan compromise on the bill collapsed following an abrupt repudiation by President Donald Trump.

The retreat left uncertain the fate of efforts to overhaul national-security surveillance while extending three partly expired tools that federal law enforcement officials use in such cases. Just days ago, the bill had appeared poised to become law, after initial approval by both the House and Senate.

But support for the measure among Republicans collapsed after Trump intervened to urge them to reject it, and civil libertarians then said they could not support the bill without greater privacy protections. With votes bleeding from both flanks, House leaders delayed a vote late Wednesday and then called if off altogether on Thursday rather than let it fail.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who had spent much of the last 24 hours trying to salvage the bill, said the House would instead initiate negotiations with the Senate to bridge their differences before attempting to clear the bill for Trump’s signature.

“Clearly, because House Republicans have prioritized politics over our national security, we will no longer have a bipartisan veto-proof majority,” she said in a letter to colleagues on Thursday morning announcing that the bill would be pulled back. “It will be our intention to go to conference in order to ensure that all of the views of all members of our caucus are represented in the final product.”

Trump has been keeping alive his grievances about the FBI investigation into whether his campaign was involved with Russia’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 election.

Trump on Tuesday that Republicans should oppose the legislation, “until such time as our Country is able to determine how and why the greatest political, criminal, and subversive scandal in USA history took place!” On Wednesday evening, before the vote, he tweeted again with a promise to veto the measure if it passed.

A part of the Russia investigation included surveillance authorized by FISA that targeted Carter Page, a former campaign adviser with close ties to Moscow. An inspector general report later uncovered myriad errors and omissions in the applications for that wiretap.

But even as Trump expresses his skepticism of the government surveillance powers, Attorney General William P. Barr has been pushing Republicans in the opposite direction. He warned on Wednesday that he would tell Trump to veto the bill because it would impose too many restrictions on law enforcement and national-security authorities.

Unlike most other legislation that becomes law in Washington today, surveillance bills in recent years have tended to pass with unusual bipartisan coalitions that must balance the interests of civil libertarians in both parties with those of more pro-law enforcement lawmakers. When the House passed an earlier version of the bill in March, for example, 152 Democrats and 126

Republicans supported it.

“The two-thirds of the Republican Party that voted for this bill in March have indicated they are going to vote against it now,” Rep. Steny H. Hoyer, D-Md., the majority leader, said on Thursday morning. “I am told they are doing so at the request of the president. I believe this to be against the security interest of the United States and the safety of the American people.”

Republican leaders in the House, many of whom have publicly praised the measure in recent days, quickly stepped into line behind the president and urged their colleagues to vote “no” so that lawmakers and the White House could reopen negotiations. They offered vague statements about the bill’s inadequacies, even though several had urged the president to sign it as recently as earlier this month.

“In moving forward today, it won’t be signed into law,” Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., the minority leader, said Wednesday. “The president has questions, and the attorney general has questions. Let’s take a deep breath and go back and work together.”

Democrats faced their own defections from the left, with the leaders of the influential progressive caucus warning that the bill before them was “far too narrow in scope and would still leave the public vulnerable to invasive online spying and data collection.”

The setback was only the latest obstacle in what has proved to be a tortuous effort to overhaul federal surveillance powers. The House initially approved the bill in March, but the Senate modified it earlier this month, sending it back to be passed again before it could go to Trump to be signed into law.