Fox News legal analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano claimed that House members delayed the release of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) memo because they wanted to expand FISA powers and were afraid the political fallout from the memo would have killed the bill.
“Ignorant of the hot potato on which the House Intelligence Committee had been sitting, Congress recently passed and President Donald Trump signed a vast expansion of spying authorities,” Napolitano wrote in a Wednesday op-ed. “The FISA expansion would never have passed the Senate had the House Intelligence Committee memo and the data on which it is based come to light seven days sooner than it did.”
“Why should 22 members of a House committee keep their 500-plus congressional colleagues in the dark about domestic spying abuses while those colleagues were debating the very subject matter of domestic spying and voting to expand the power of those who have abused it?” Napolitano added.
Napolitano thinks the culture of the intelligence community has taken a dark turn and has exerted its authority over America’s elected officials.
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“The NSA shows its might to the legislators who supposedly regulate it. In reality, the NSA regulates them,” Napolitano wrote. “This is but one facet of the deep state — the unseen parts of the government that are not authorized by the Constitution and that never change, no matter which party controls the legislative or executive branch. This time, they almost blew it. If just one conscientious senator had changed her or his vote on the FISA expansion — had that senator known of the NSA and FBI abuses of FISA concealed by the House Intelligence Committee — the expansion would have failed.”
Napolitano also believes former deputy director Andrew McCabe was dismissed from the FBI because of the contents of the memo, and said McCabe had been confirmed as one of the “abusers of spying authority.”
“The government works for us; we should not tolerate its treating us as children,” Napolitano writes. “Where is the personal courage on the House Intelligence Committee? Where is the patriotism? Where is the fidelity to the Constitution? The government exists by our consent. It derives its powers from us. We have a right to know what it has done in our names, who broke our trust, who knew about it, who looked the other way and why and by whom all this was intentionally hidden until after Congress voted to expand FISA.”
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