A last-minute maneuver by a top House Judiciary Committee Democrat is threatening to sink a months-long effort to reauthorize surveillance authorities due to expire next month.
Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) is preparing Wednesday to offer five amendments that would reform the Watergate-era law, known as FISA, that senior House Democrats see as "poison pills" that would doom the bill in the House. Her push is already rankling top Democrats, who say her proposals would upend months of delicate negotiations that resulted in a bill backed by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.).
The staffs of both committees had also consulted extensively with intelligence community officials and outside civil liberties advocates like the ACLU to forge a delicate compromise.
There had also been staff level discussions between Lofgren's staff and the committees negotiating the bill, who believed until Tuesday that there would be no amendment effort. But Lofgren says she will press ahead, and her amendments, which have been supported by House progressives, could upset that balance and force changes to the bill that could tank it altogether, senior Democratic aides say.
"The committee and Chairman Nadler have been working very carefully in intense negotiation for months with all the interest groups and had worked out a very carefully negotiated reform bill of FISA," one senior Democratic aide said, noting that the alliance between Nadler and Schiff had been the product of talks that occurred in earnest even as both committees were deeply involved in the impeachment process.
But Lofgren rejects the notion that her amendments will jeopardize the measure's chances of passing the House.
"I reject that categorization of what we’re doing here," Lofgren said in a phone interview. "We’re making policy. This isn’t some game where side deals that are done in secret without the concurrence of the committees of jurisdiction is somehow binding on the members of the committee."
The FISA law includes provisions relied on by the FBI and NSA to aid terrorism investigations. Three of those provisions are due to expire on March 15. But the complexity of the law, its implications for civil liberties and recent questions about the FBI's handling of the FISA process raised in a watchdog report, have complicated effort to renew them.
President Donald Trump, in particular, is viewed as a wildcard in the debate. He has railed against his own intelligence officials for what he contends was an illegal FISA spying operation on his 2016 campaign. An inspector general's report in December described significant failures by the FBI in obtaining a FISA warrant to surveil Carter Page in late 2016, weeks after he departed the Trump campaign as a foreign policy adviser. Trump's allies in Congress have hammered the FBI and intelligence officials for those failures and suggested there should be major changes to the law to prevent abuses.
Attorney General William Barr on Tuesday spoke privately to Senate Republicans about reauthorizing FISA, telling them that the Trump administration could support extending it. Barr said he would make administrative changes to the law to mollify the president.
Lofgren's late effort to amend the legislation is forcing an internal scramble among House Democrats, with leadership watching cautiously, prepared to intervene if the dispute isn't resolved. Lofgren noted the amendments are pulled from her own bipartisan FISA reform bill that she has long championed and vocally supported.
"If we don’t take this opportunity to reform the FISA process we are missing an opportunity," Lofgren said. "There is bipartisan interest on the House side in reform and we ought to take advantage of that circumstance."
Lofgren said she hasn't spoken to Speaker Nancy Pelosi about her amendments, noting that today's Judiciary Committee markup of the bill would be the "beginning of the process." She described her proposals as "modest" changes that shouldn't jeopardize the underlying legislation.
"This goes back decades," Lofgren said, pointing to the passage of the 2001 PATRIOT Act. "Many times we’ve had the chairmen, either Republican or Democratic chairmen, saying, ‘we have to hold off, otherwise the [House Intelligence Committee] people blow this up.’ And as a consequence of that, 20 years in, we haven’t reformed it. I’m done with that."
Heather Caygle contributed to this report.
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