House Passes Spy Bill Update With Bipartisan Support, Criticism

(Bloomberg) -- The House passed a bipartisan bill Wednesday to extend provisions of a law authorizing surveillance of suspected spies and terrorists, overcoming criticism in both parties that it doesn’t adequately insulate Americans from abuses.

The 278-136 vote came as congressional leaders scramble to avoid a lapse of the national security provisions after Sunday’s deadline. Attorney General William Barr, who led negotiations with House members, announced before the vote that he supported the bill.

Soon after the House vote, the bill was endorsed top Senate Republicans including Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, second-ranking Republican John Thune, Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham and Intelligence Chairman Richard Burr. Still, efforts to pass the bill this week could be complicated if two Republican dissidents stick to their pledge to oppose the effort.

The Republican leaders said they applauded the House bill and “look forward to voting to pass it in the Senate as soon as possible."

The Senate, like the House, plans to leave Washington Thursday for a recess through next week. Passing a temporary extension would be one alternative to letting the sections of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act expire.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the House’s top Republican, Kevin McCarthy, both of California, backed the bill, H.R. 6172. So did the Judiciary Committee’s Democratic Chairman Jerrold Nadler and top Republican Jim Jordan, and the Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff and ranking Republican Devin Nunes.

‘Decisive Steps’

“I have voted against every FISA bill that did not contain significant reform,” Nadler said before the vote. “But the measure before us today does contain significant reform -- again, not every change we would like to see, but decisive steps in the right direction.”

Representative Zoe Lofgren, a Judiciary Committee Democrat who helped lead efforts by liberals to include broader protections for citizens, said, “It’s unfortunate that this bill does not include significant reforms that are necessary to protect Americans’ civil liberties.”

Representative Tom Massie, a libertarian-leaning Kentucky Republican, criticized the bill on the House floor as having “the thin varnish of reform on it designed to whitewash the egregious constitutional violations that have been going on.”

The bill would revise the process for getting approval by a special court for surveillance of suspected terrorists. It would require the attorney general to approve FISA applications dealing with elected officials and federal candidates, and allow appointed, independent monitors to review FISA applications.

The measure would make it a crime to lie to the FISA court and would let the House and Senate Intelligence committees review FISA applications and materials.

Phone Call Records

It would bar the government from restarting the National Security Agency’s two-decades-old Call Detail Records program, which authorized the secret mass collection of telephone call records. The program was ended last year.

The proposal also would prohibit the government from using the FISA law to collect cell phone site-location or GPS information. The provisions would be extended until Dec. 1, 2023.

Even some of the legislation’s supporters and allies of President Donald Trump have focused on investigative missteps in the FISA warrants obtained for then-Trump campaign adviser Carter Page during a federal investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

Massie said Wednesday that foreign terrorists don’t have constitutional rights. Still, he said, “one of the worst things that’s happened as a result of the FISA and the Patriot Act is that a presidential candidate was spied on. He’s now the president.”

Barr said in a statement that the proposal was shaped in part by the recommendations from a Justice Department inspector general report criticizing “compliance failures” in obtaining the warrants against Page from a FISA court.

The main opposition in the Senate comes from Republicans Rand Paul of Kentucky and Mike Lee of Utah to a provision that lets U.S. intelligence agencies collect phone metadata and other material about Americans without court warrants.

The two could withhold their consent for the House-passed bill to move quickly through the Senate, forcing the measure through days of Senate procedure. But they couldn’t ultimately keep the Senate from passing the bill.

Paul is hoping to get a vote on his amendment preventing the FISA process from being used to target Americans, and pitching Trump to reject the bill despite Barr’s support.

‘Misuse This System’

Members of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, a group that Jordan helped found, were among those who opposed the measure on grounds the proposed protections don’t go far enough.

“If the government can misuse this system to spy on a presidential campaign, they can surely do it to any other American citizen,” the group said in a statement.

The American Civil Liberties Union, which has advocated for revising the law, also said the bipartisan House deal falls short of the changes needed to protect Americans.

Lofgren, in her statement before the vote, said the FBI will still have authority to “illegally” conduct surveillance on Americans “for simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time,” such as attending the same religious service or same gun show as a target. Intelligence agencies also could obtain Americans’ web browsing history without a warrant.

“In short, the intelligence community will continue to be held to different, more lenient standards than law enforcement officials when obtaining court-ordered warrants,” she said.

--With assistance from Chris Strohm.

To contact the reporter on this story: Billy House in Washington at bhouse5@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Kevin Whitelaw at kwhitelaw@bloomberg.net, Laurie Asséo, Anna Edgerton

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