Trump wants to spy on you, and he will. Massie’s amendments rejected.
Notice the Framing
Truth Social: I am working very hard with our Great Speaker, Mike Johnson, along with Chairman Jim Jordan and Chairman Rick Crawford, to get a clean extension of FISA 702 through the House of Representatives this week. I am asking Republicans to UNIFY, and vote together on the test vote to bring a clean Bill to the floor. We need to stick together when this Bill comes before the House Rules Committee today to keep it CLEAN!
When the Dirty Cop, James Comey, the failed Head of the FBI went after me, he was using FISA Title I, the Domestic Collection, not FISA 702, the Foreign Collection, which needs to be extended today. While parts of FISA were illegally and unfortunately used against me in the Democrats’ disgraceful Witch Hunt and Attack in the RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA Hoax, and perhaps would be used against me in the future, I am willing to risk the giving up of my Rights and Privileges as a Citizen for our Great Military and Country! Our Military Patriots desperately need FISA 702, and it is one of the reasons we have had such tremendous SUCCESS on the battlefield. I have spoken with many in our Military who say FISA is necessary in order to protect our Troops overseas, as well as our people here at home, from the threat of Foreign Terror Attacks. It has already prevented MANY such Attacks, and it is very important that it remain in full force and effect. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP
Glen Greenwald
MTG on FISA
Warrantless Spying Is So MAGA Now
You may agree or disagree with the bill. But there are seriously troubling aspects to the setup.
First, Trump ran against spying but he now demands an extension of domestic spying with no reforms. He intends domestic spying.
Second, Trump accurately phrases the bill as intrusion on Constitutional rights. But he is OK with that. Nobody should be OK with giving up Constitutional rights. To do so would be unconstitutional by definition.
Third, Trump phrases it a “my rights” (his rights) as if nobody else’s rights matter.
The risk is in giving up rights for any reason. Of course it’s a risk Trump is willing to take because he intends to spy on people who disagree with him.
Warrantless Spying
The FBI improperly used warrantless search powers against U.S. citizens more than 278,000 times in just one year.
Please note FBI repeatedly misused surveillance tool, unsealed FISA order reveals
The FBI repeatedly misused a surveillance tool in searching for foreign intelligence to use in cases pertaining to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and 2020 racial justice protests, according to an April 2022 court order publicly released Friday.
The order, which was released by the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, is significantly redacted but reveals thousands of violations of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which allows the federal government to collect communications between certain targeted foreign individuals outside the U.S.
A senior FBI official told The Hill in a statement that the errors described in the order are “completely unacceptable,” as FBI Director Christopher Wray has said. The official said the changes that the bureau has implemented are designed to ensure the errors do not happen again.
The FBI has come under intense criticism from some conservative detractors who have alleged political motivation and improper practices have guided the agency, instead of pursuing equal justice under the law.
Massie Offers Three Fixes
Trump wants to spy on his political enemies and he will if this passes as is.
The risk he is willing to take is Democrats spy on him when they are back in power.
But he intends to prevent that as well by stealing the election.
Here is Judge Napolitano’s take on this FISA bill:
https://original.antiwar.com/andrew-p-napolitano/2026/04/15/american-heresy/
Even with required court approval, some judges just rubber stamp FISA requests, a problem that might be very hard to mitigate. I believe the warrants should be made public without exception within about 5 days of judges signing and their needs to be personal criminal liability without statute of limitations for the official that signs the request with any successful after the fact challenge requiring mandatory jail time. Failure to make the warrant public should automatically disbar the judge via administrative procedure, no exceptions.
“The risk he is willing to take is Democrats spy on him when they are back in power.”
Some risk? People forget that Donald Epstein is 80 years old. He doesn’t give a flying f#*$ about too much, I would think.
Most amazing to me is how little people care that their government monitors all speech and all movement of all of its people
Every breath you take
And every move you make
Every bond you break
Every step you take
I’ll be watching you
Every single day
And every word you say
Every game you play
Every night you stay
I’ll be watching you
‘I am willing to risk the giving up of my Rights and Privileges as a Citizen for our Great Military and Country!’
That is the scariest thing I have ever heard a president say. This man has lost it and needs to be removed from office. What more does Congress need?
Major jewish organizations support FISA renewal as it is vital for the security of ISRAEL.
https://x.com/infolibnews/status/2044635123887358350/photo/1
TRUMP IS action as if the Mid-Terms are not gonna happen. WILL be use Presidential Powers and say that THE IRAN WARs (China War) is an effective reason to cancel elections?
The good thing is that we do not vote in this family but many people here think the Presidents and Congress people are lined up to HELP US.
Nothing can be further from the truths of how this Country is “operated.”
Mish, who are the Top 10 Standard Bearers of MAGA right now?
This is anecdotal of course, but the most MAGA person I know now fills social media with messages hating on Trump, saying he betrayed them, etc, and others are joining in. It’s now become socially acceptable to cross Trump in MAGA circles. The dam may break.
And its also become socially acceptable to publicly say that you didn’t take the shots and state your reasons why. As the magnetic pole reversal accelerates, so to does everything else downstream.
Not in my experience, they’re still drinking the Koolaid and nothing will talk them out of another swig.
Believe me, I hope you are right. I would love to be wrong.
More anecdotal data: Two longtime friends that voted for Trump three times are vehemently against him. They remain Republicans but are no longer Trumplicans. A third friend remains selectively supportive but avoids like the plague any discussion of his foreign and war policies, immigration enforcement and his grift.
S&P new record high…TRUMP was right again!
Now, about that inflation…..3…2….1….
BREAKING: Pope is two weeks away from making a nuclear bomb
Well, we’ll be hearing that for the next 13 years or until a stupid president is elected that believes it…..oh wait.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BWYg6deuy0
Even more two weeks away than he was five years ago
This Vote on allowing spying on citizens— that has been happening for decades already by Government Agencies is a cruel joke. It’s like a bunch of starving Vultures voting on eating or not eating a dead pig? We know what they will do anyway. So quit wasting our time pretending Spying on Citizens could be Stopped—— no matter what the Vote. The only question is how fast will Spying continue to Grow?
having a. law that allows it obviously makes it be used more broadly
IT is just IN OUR FACES the way it is going….NAH-NAH-NAH NAHHHHH NAH-NAH!
Sad.
One more 911 and they’ll get us to bend over and allow any and all surveillance 24-7-365
The whole Edward Snowden affair served as a test (sort of a psyop actually) to see if Americans would give any pushback to what had become a full-on Orwellian surveillance state.
The answer was no. The sheeple shrugged and memory-holed all of Snowden’s revelations. Clapper lied to Congress about the government spying on American citizens. Perjury charges? Crickets.
Since then we’ve just gone deeper and deeper into a lawless, corrupt, upside down clown world. There’s a war going on that is certain to bring great economic dislocation, but the S&P 500 set an all time record today.
DJT wants us to equate the market with the “economy”. Check the percentage of stock ownership among the bottom 70% of voting citizens. The market is largely irrelevant to them. What is relevant is the price of the gas to take you to your low wage job which is increasingly threatened by AI (e.g., self-checkout cashiers, digital price tagging in grocery stores, and ‘trainable robots’)
The average frustrated American chump is sure he is free, since you can go to the mall or on Amazon and buy anything you want, as long as your credit is decent.
On a different topic. Looks like orban was sending money to cpac.
Trump posed during the campaign as someone who would do something about the Epstein class that rules the country. He lied. He is their pimp.
Will half his voters ever realize it?
No. You’d have better luck talking sense to the members of the Jim Jones Peoples’ Temple.
The continued support of the surveillance state is disgusting and shameful. Good to see at least Thomas Massie standing up for privacy.
I can’t imagine the government doesn’t already have access to whatever it wants. The question is do they have a right to act on it if illegally obtained. Evidence illegally obtained means no chance of conviction later on. But that might not matter if all they want is the information itself to know who’s doing what. We rail against China but we’re becoming more like them everyday. Slow but sure.
They buy their information from data brokers, perfectly legal.
With AI and deep fakes etc they’ll soon be fabricating whatever information they need for whatever purpose they want.
The issue is not government access, to my mind. The issue is whether there is a department of justice willing to prosecute violations of existing laws. The “unitary executive” theory (which originated in the “Mandate for Change” and spawned the Project 2025) is steadily and effectively erasing any independence of the department of justice. The “attorney general” of the United States is sworn to uphold and defend the constitution; trump and his loyalists are on a mission to extend the thesis that “the President cannot, by definition, commit an illegal act” (cf. Richard Nixon, as amplified by DJT and SCt – which modified it slightly to “in the course of his official duties”) to the mandate given to the department of justice and its senior most official, the AG.
No excuses for Ike or Clinton. The former was the first to permit J. Edgar to spy on Americans in the McCarthy era and the latter to provide digital back door access of Americans through telecommunications spying.
George W Bush and every successor has used illegal wiretaps as a means to spy on Americans and by proxy suspend the first, fourth, fifth and sixth amendments in the guise of protecting Americans from their fellow citizens.
Probably worse than China.
They don’t want Chinese network gear because it hinders eaves-dropping and circumvents all the mandated back-doors under secret judicial orders.
The social credit system is a propaganda ruse, like the Uyghur concentration camps.
(We hate Chinese and Muslims, but just love Chinese Muslims, esp. Jihadis).
Who has more people in jail?
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3774114/
Remember when domestic spying was almost scandalous? Pepperidge Farm remembers.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gXUxLqqmhNs
“Some of you may die, but that’s a risk I’m willing to take” Prince dulac in Shrek
Present work-arounds include The US government spies on Europeans on behalf of European governments and exchanges the intelligence for that obtained by European governments on US citizens.
The only bill to guarantee the US government did not spy on its citizen would be to dismantle the electronic equipment in present use.
If anyone is interested in going down the rabbit hole of how computers are used to spy on Americans, they can check out the site ‘Schneier on Security’ which has many technical articles on it.
Americans actually have complete ‘freedom of speech’ only until they become a threat to people in power.
Anything that might have merit in some form, is defiled and undone by this fool’s overreach and horrid messaging. That doesn’t excuse everyone else, but he is a cartoon version of all that. Maybe this extremity at last draws the right kind of scrutiny and attention to various weird drifts of government in the last 30 or so years? Maybe it restarts conversations? (I am not saying that was Trump’s conscious intent. He wants his own railroading to operate unhindered.)
By doing so many atrocious things in plain view, I think Trumpstein might end up being a blessing after all in that he could bring on the revolution faster than it would have arrived under the drip-drip-drip nonsense of the “usual” deep state-ers.
You are the definition of optimism. We are too fat and lazy to have any interest in getting up off our asses to actually take the trouble to write an email to our representative. As long as we get our bread and circuses, we’ll let them continue.
Actually, I continue to have hope. Our low electoral participation has been a double edged sword: the more impassioned voters (and senior citizens) turn out to vote. This current cycle has allowed a greater number of reformers/progressives to climb on the bus. While it will take time, the current crop of local and state officials will mature into state and national figures. We can hope that this slow moving tide is different in character to the swamp-dwellers. Every one is susceptible to “power corrupts” and “money=power”, but we (or at least I) can hope that even if 50% of the new crop falls victim to that human frailty, there is still 50% who may revert to a different vision for the future.
Conservatives and Progressives that still believe in the Bill of Rights have found common ground on this issue. The US is due for a freedom, equal rights decade. They occur every thirty to sixty years. Obama postponed it as did Trump in the hope by their respective voting blocks that reform would restore the American Dream of each generation improving their living standards from the prior generation and reducing foreign wars. Instead they lied and double downed on the national security state, increased the wealth and income divide, expanded the MIC and foreign wars, restricted civil rights, imprisoned or killed Americans without due process, etc..
The recent killing of the United Healthcare CEO, shooting up of the Chat GPT CEO, protests against ICE in Minnesota, the reversal in the polls for support of Israel are just the tip of the iceberg should the Iraq War and the ongoing credit crises and debt bubble continue to exacerbate the the political and economic wellbeing of the bottom 80 percent coupled with a market correction of anywhere between 30% and 50 percent.