Congress Takes Action To Reign in The FBI

(HorizonPost.com) – Congress is looking to take action to rein in the powers of the FBI after mounting evidence of the agency targeting Americans, according to Just the News. The bipartisan effort is looking at a surveillance law that will reportedly protect civil liberties.

The government is currently equipped with powers outlined in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Section 702. The powers enumerated allow the government to spy on Americans’ phone records which are justified as counterterrorism and counterintelligence measures. But the power also gave the government the go-ahead to unlawfully put Trump campaign advisor Carter Page under the microscope while attempting to prove Russia collusion, which has since been debunked. 

While the law has been renewed so that the federal government would have the abilities it needed to fight terrorism, reports from the FISA Court and Intelligence Community show that the powers were abused by the government and even targeted a member of Congress. 

The Republican-controlled House Intelligence Committee is now leading a bipartisan effort to revise the law. Republican Rep. Austin Scott told Just the News that the law has been abused by both the FBI and Intelligence Community. He said that those people within these agencies who violated the law should be held accountable for what they did. Scott added that there seems to be general bipartisan support for getting lawyers for Americans who are being secretly spied upon. 

The Department of Justice released a 2020 report documenting the actions of the FBI’s “Crossfire Hurricane” operation that focused on whether Trump and his associates were tied to Russia. The operation was riddled with malfeasance, such as the falsified “Steele Dossier,” which was reportedly used to wiretap Carter Page. 

Supervisory Intelligence Analyst Brian Auten was reportedly involved in vetting the dossier and served on the probe into Hunter Biden’s laptop despite his attempt to discredit unfavorable evidence by labeling it “Russian disinformation.”

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