Cornyn said Section 702 content generates about 60 percent of the president’s daily brief, a figure also cited by Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley.
Some Republicans dispute the disaster designation. Texas Representative Keith Self called the warnings “hysteria”, arguing that other FISA authorities would remain in place and that supporters should accept reforms such as the warrant requirement: “FISA is not going dark. We have the law. We have precedent from 2008. Don’t fall for scare tactics.” The liberal Cato Institute has made a similar point.
“The [702] The FISA court has permission to continue the program for another year, so it will continue whether we take action or not,” said a senior Republican aide on the relevant committee. ”No member saying the program ends on Friday will claim that it actually ends on Monday – especially at Intel. They know better.”
Hajar Hammado, senior policy adviser at Demand Progress, was more bullish still. He said, “If the Republican leadership truly believes their unfounded fears being spread about security at the World Cup, they will do whatever it takes to get a deal to renew FISA by ultimately allowing votes on warrant requirements.” “Any threat to national security during the World Cup lies squarely in the hands of Cotton, Grassley, and Trump officials, who still refuse to allow votes on popular bipartisan reforms.” He said the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has already ruled that 702 surveillance under existing orders will remain in effect until March 2027. This makes Johnson and Thune’s warnings about imminent national security consequences, in their view, a threat to civil liberties framed as a matter of urgency.
Still, the Republican chairmen of the Senate Intelligence and Judiciary committees, Tom Cotton and Chuck Grassley, respectively, have called on the administration to plan for the collection gap — including drafting an executive order to fill it, if necessary.
Jake Leperuke, a surveillance policy expert at the Center for Democracy and Technology, said the impasse is a symptom of the failure of a deliberative process. “We don’t need to ride off into the sunset, and we don’t need to continue the same chaotic process of punishing FISA with another short-term extension,” he said. “We can end the impasse and resolve this issue now, but leadership needs to stop stifling debate and allow votes on warrants and reforms, as we have always done in the past. Blocking reform votes is the reason we are in this mess, and allowing votes on reforms is the only way out of it.”
The fight is unfolding as the government withholds two sets of records based on how Section 702 is used. In a letter to colleagues on June 3, Senator Ron Wyden wrote that warrantless searches of American politicians, activists and journalists are set to more than triple in 2025 and that the still-secret FISA court opinion from March describes serious abuses. The administration has refused to make it public even after a joint request by Intelligence Committee leaders to release it.
Separately, in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by Cato, the FBI disclosed in a June 4 court filing that it had identified approximately 39,650 potentially liable pages of Section 702 non-compliance records, but said it would not begin releasing them until mid-August.
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