The same intelligence “experts” who penned the infamous Hunter Biden laptop letter in October 2020 are now calling on lawmakers to reauthorize the warrantless surveillance state through the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).
On Monday, 46 former national security officials signed a letter urging Capitol Hill to rubber stamp the reauthorization of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The same law was abused by deep-state FBI agents to surveil members of Trump’s campaign. The more than three dozen former national security officials who signed the letter invoked the fentanyl crisis and overseas turmoil to make their case for unconstitutional surveillance.
“As you well know, our nation is under significant threat today with wars in Europe and the Middle East, a potential conflict with China in the Indo-Pacific, and the deadly flow of fentanyl across our southern border,” they wrote. “In these circumstances, we cannot hamstring the U.S. Intelligence Community either by failing to renew Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act or by limiting it in ways that would make it difficult for the government to protect Americans.”
Four of the letter’s signatories also signed the letter in the fall of 2020 that sought to discredit Hunter Biden’s laptop as an instrument of Russian interference. Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former Deputy Director for the National Security Agency (NSA) Richard Ledgett, former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Acting Director Michael Morell, and former CIA Chief of Staff Jeremy Bash each put their names on both the humiliating 2020 laptop letter and Monday’s call to reauthorize baseless surveillance.
Lawmakers on Capitol Hill are preparing to reauthorize Section 702 of FISA, which expires on Dec. 31, without significant reform through the NDAA, an annual defense bill. Section 702 ostensibly allows federal intelligence officials to monitor “non-U.S. persons, located abroad, who are expected to possess, receive, or communicate foreign intelligence information.” FISA has been abused, however, to conduct domestic surveillance of the regime’s political opponents.
Now the same former federal intelligence officials who propped up President Joe Biden in 2020 by peddling a Russian conspiracy theory have demanded that Congress keep the levers of their “insurance policy” for 2024 intact.
“There’s no substitute for it,” they wrote Monday.
In an interview with New York Magazine, Clapper defended signing the discredited Biden laptop letter last fall. The letter’s allegations of Russian interference were quickly debunked with rare on-the-record statements from the FBI, the Department of Justice, the Department of National Intelligence, and the State Department, all before Election Day.
“Clapper was not pleased to be asked about the letter two years after its release,” the magazine reported.
“What are you trying to get me to say, that I screwed up and I shouldn’t have signed the letter? I’m not going to say that,” Clapper told the paper. “As far as I was concerned, we were waving the yellow flag. At the time, it was fishy to me. It had the characteristics of a Russian disinformation campaign.”
Morell, the former acting CIA director who signed both letters, was a campaign surrogate for President Biden in the 2020 election and “admitted he drafted and circulated the letter to give Joe Biden a talking point to use during a 2020 presidential debate against then-President Donald Trump.”
[READ: CIA Solicited Signatures For Hunter Biden Laptop Letter, Congressional Testimony Shows]
On Monday last week, House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan sent a letter to former CIA Director William Burns demanding to know who, if any, of the 51 former intelligence officials who signed the Biden laptop letter were paid by the agency.
“We understand that former intelligence officials often return to the intelligence community under private contract for their previous agencies,” Jordan wrote. “It is vital to the Committees’ oversight to understand whether any of the signatories of the public statement were actively employed by CIA as contractors or consultants at the time they signed the public statement.”
Last week, Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, blasted the congressional effort to pass a proposed FISA reform measure as a “thinly veiled way of saying ‘FISA 702 is just fine as it is.'”
“The FBI has used Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to conduct warrantless ‘backdoor’ searches of the private electronic communications of American citizens,” Lee wrote in a Blaze op-ed on Monday. “It has done so, moreover, not just sporadically and by accident but quite deliberately and on hundreds of thousands of occasions.”
The Brennan Center for Justice agrees, calling the proposed measure by House Republicans the “biggest expansion in government surveillance since the Patriot Act.” The liberal think tank faults provisions that would expand corporate compliance with government surveillance programs without adequate safeguards to prevent abuse.
“Despite its name, the FISA Reform and Reauthorization Act is not a reform bill. It is an anti-reform bill in disguise,” reads a Brennan Center policy paper. “Not only does it fail to rein in warrantless surveillance of Americans of Section 702; it would actually expand surveillance in critical respects, effectively rewarding the FBI for years of misconduct and thus encouraging even more flagrant abuse in the future.”
