Sen. Mike Lee said Tuesday that now-acknowledged problems with how the FBI obtained permission four years ago to eavesdrop on a Trump campaign aide mistakenly believed to be a Russian spy show that it’s time to reform the secretive approval system.
“The FISA process must be reformed,” the Utah Republican said about the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which establishes procedures to obtain permission for surveillance of suspected spies.
“We can’t ask Americans to continue to give the federal government this enormous amount of unsupervised scrutiny and discretion only to have it abused,” he said during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing.
That hearing was the fourth in a series called by Republicans into an FBI investigation, codenamed “Crossfire Hurricane,” that examined possible collusion between President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia to defeat Hillary Clinton.
An earlier inspector general’s report had found numerous errors and omissions with materials submitted by the FBI to a secretive surveillance court to obtain permission to eavesdrop on Trump aide Carter Page. It said it failed to meet a responsibility for “heightened candor” when it emphasized damaging information while it downplayed exculpatory evidence.
In earlier hearings, former FBI Director James Comey said he would not have signed court submissions if he had known of the problems, but — like the inspector general — said the agency had no political agenda as it investigated claims.
On Tuesday, former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe also testified he would not have signed repeated court applications if he had known about the problems. That led to some loud criticism from Lee, who said someone should have known and stopped the paperwork.
“How are we supposed to tell the American people to have confidence in the secretive FISA surveillance process, if … no one in FBI leadership, no one in leadership of DOJ [Department of Justice] or FBI wants to admit that they were aware of serious flaws in a very high-profile investigation?”
Lee added, “Every FBI official who’s testified in front of this committee on this issue [says], ‘Trust us, we’re the good guys and we need these secret surveillance authorities in order to keep you safe. And furthermore, you don’t need to worry about them. These aren’t the droids you were looking for.’ ”
Lee also told McCabe, “Your abuse of the FISA process has cost you the trust of the American people,” and hurt the ability of the FBI to do its job. “That’s why this structure must change, and I won’t rest until it does.”
McCabe responded that findings by the inspector general showed “we were overconfident in the process we have been using,” and the process needs review. Lee said even more is needed. “It’s the law that’s the problem. It gives an unfair amount of discretion to human beings who have proven time and again they can’t be trusted with it.”
Lee and Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., have introduced legislation to restructure the system, which has passed the Senate but not the House.
It would require FISA court judges to appoint a neutral third-party observer in any case involving a “sensitive investigative matter” so long as the FISA court does not determine it to be inappropriate. It would give the court and the outside observer access to all documents and information related to the surveillance application.
Page was one of the first four suspects among Trump’s campaign staff targeted by the FBI and was the only one of the four who came away without a criminal conviction or guilty plea.
