House Judiciary chairman Jim Jordan (R., Ohio) said he and his colleagues will attempt to rein in the FBI after recent reports of malfeasance at the law-enforcement agency.
Appearing on Fox News’s Sunday Morning Futures, Jordan explained that the first step is to get the American people to understand “how their government — their agencies — have turned on them, the taxpayer.” The next step is to use Congress’s power of the purse to get the agency’s attention and also make sure to reform the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).
The last week saw multiple damaging revelations about the FBI come to light. On Monday, special counsel John Durham released his much-anticipated report that the Department of Justice and the FBI did not have “any actual evidence of collusion” between Russian officials and Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, and began their Crossfire Hurricane probe of Trump’s campaign based on “raw, unanalyzed, and uncorroborated intelligence.” On Thursday, the Judiciary Committee heard from three FBI whistleblowers that the agency targeted pro-life groups, Catholics, and parents attending school-board meetings. Finally, on Friday, news broke that FBI misused the FISA Section 702 database — a warrantless-surveillance tool — some 278,000 times.
“In the end, money always gets people’s attention. What we’re going to have to do is say, ‘Hey FBI, you can’t use federal tax dollars . . . for this kind of activity.’ We got to limit how they spend the money,” Jordan said, specifically mentioning that he may target the hundreds of millions that the FBI is requesting to construct a new facility. “No way we should approve that.”
Jordan explained that all twelve appropriations bills will be passed in the coming months, and his staff on the Judiciary Committee has been meeting with Appropriations staff to work to limit these agencies. “The key is the money,” Jordan reiterated.
The Judiciary chairman mentioned that FISA reauthorization is coming up at the end of this year and a clean reauthorization is off the table.
The Durham report revealed that the FBI did not give due consideration to the possibility that the Steele dossier, used to obtain a FISA warrant to surveil Trump-campaign aide Carter Page, was Russian disinformation.
“They took a dossier that they knew was false, and that became the basis to go get a warrant to spy on a presidential campaign and to spy on American citizens. You can’t do that in this country,” Jordan asserted.
The news just Friday that the FBI had misused the Section 702 database, which is used to surveil foreigners but can also be used to surveil Americans without a warrant if those Americans are in contact with foreign targets, identified a number of targets stateside, including 19,000 donors to a congressional candidate, crime victims, Black Lives Matter protesters, and January 6 suspects.
“There is no way we are going to support reauthorizing FISA in this current form. No possible way. I think every single Republican on the Judiciary Committee is committed to fundamental change in how that process works,” said Jordan, adding that “278,000 times the FBI abused Americans’s rights, . . . including a congressional campaign, for goodness’s sake.”
A House working group has already been formed to consider reforms to Section 702. Queries of the communications of Americans — proper or improper — significantly dropped in 2022 after the FBI instituted certain internal changes. However, members of Congress weren’t impressed. “It is incumbent upon Congress, not the Executive Branch, to codify reforms to FISA Section 702,” said Representative Darin LaHood (R., Ill.), who believes he has been surveilled by the program, and House Intelligence Committee chairman Mike Turner (R., Ohio).
“That has to fundamentally change and we’re committed to making that happen this Congress,” Jordan added.