Congress

Conservatives who haven’t given up on slashing the scope of the wiretapping authority are already strategizing about how to win the next battle in two years.

Rep. Jim Jordan predicts a Donald Trump victory in November would set the stage for “real reform” of the Section 702 program. | Francis Chung/POLITICO

By Jordain Carney and John Sakellariadis

04/29/2024 05:00 AM EDT

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The intelligence community and its allies in Congress waged an all-out battle to preserve a contentious government spy power — and they won, fending off a conservative-liberal coalition that demanded a dramatic overhaul.

But they may not be celebrating for long.

That’s because, in order to push through reauthorization of the surveillance power known as Section 702, which allows the government to collect and search foreign communications without a warrant, Speaker Mike Johnson had to make an eleventh-hour concession to hardliners on his right this month by slashing the program’s extension from five years to two years. While it looked like a small tweak in the overall sweep of the brutal surveillance debate, it reflected a high-stakes political gamble.

Conservatives who haven’t given up on slashing the scope of government’s wiretapping authority are already strategizing about how to win the next battle in 2026. They see their prospects as significantly boosted if former President Donald Trump — who earlier this month called on Congress to “kill” the broader spy law that Section 702 is nested in — wins back the White House in November.

The shorter timeframe “is certainly better, because we’ll get another whack at the kind of reforms that we think we need to have,” Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) said in an interview.

The House’s dramatic deadlock on whether to require a warrant when searching for Americans in the foreign communications collected under the spy power shows “where the Congress is moving,” Jordan added, predicting that a Trump victory would set the stage for “real reform” of the program.

No matter who wins the White House, the enduring push to revisit the spy power amounts to a warning for intelligence........

© Politico