An exchange of gunfire between an armed suspect and law enforcement outside the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday occurred days before a deadline to extend broad government surveillance powers. President Donald Trump seized on the attempted attack to argue the FBI must be allowed to spy on Americans without warrants.
In a Fox News Sunday interview, Trump said he is “willing to give up [his] security” to extend Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which is set to expire on Thursday, and suggested Americans should accept similar trade-offs “for the safety of our nation.”
Section 702 permits U.S. intelligence agencies to collect electronic communications of foreign nationals overseas without a warrant. Because many of those foreign nationals communicate with Americans, the program can capture emails, texts, and calls of U.S. persons.
Fox anchor Jacqui Heinrich noted it is not yet known whether the suspect, Cole Tomas Allen, “was radicalized” by foreign actors and asked whether the shooting underscored “the importance of having these tools to protect our country from these kinds of threats.”
Trump complained that former FBI Director James Comey used FISA to obtain warrants targeting a former Trump aide during the probe of the 2016 campaign’s ties to Russia, and he said FISA has been used in operations involving Iran and in actions related to Venezuela. “It’s really needed for national security,” Trump said. “Iran is decimated, and we got a lot of information by using FISA… I’m willing to give up my security for the military because ultimately that’s to me the highest cause is, you know, the safety of our nation.”
Critics say the record of Section 702 preventing attacks is thin. Jordan Liz, an associate professor of philosophy at San José State University, wrote that while officials claim Section 702 has stopped many terror plots, there is little public evidence to support sweeping claims. Citing the Cato Institute, Liz noted one well-documented case: the 2009 New York subway bombing plot. In that instance the NSA tracked an exchange between an al-Qaeda courier and Najibullah Zazi; the NSA passed the information to the FBI, which disrupted the plot. But the NSA reportedly obtained the courier’s foreign email address from British intelligence, underscoring the role of allied information-sharing rather than proving Section 702’s unique necessity.
Authorities believe the White House dinner suspect acted alone, and no evidence has been released showing he communicated with foreign entities. A document he wrote referenced his Christian beliefs and mentioned reports about the administration’s treatment of immigrants in detention, boat-bombing operations in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, and the bombing of an elementary school in Iran.
Trump has been pushing to extend Section 702. The program was reauthorized in 2024, and earlier this month two attempts to extend it — one for 18 months and another for five years — failed amid objections to the absence of privacy reforms and a loophole allowing data brokers to sell private information about Americans to government agencies without judicial approval.
After those proposals failed, House Speaker Mike Johnson unveiled a new bill to extend Section 702 for three years, require the FBI to submit monthly reports on its reviews of Americans’ data to an oversight official, and impose penalties for abuse—measures privacy advocates criticized as insufficient. The House Rules Committee was scheduled to meet Monday to advance the bill toward a vote. Rep. Jamie Raskin circulated a memo urging colleagues to reject the proposal, saying it “continues the disastrous policy of trusting the FBI to self-police and self-report its abuses of Section 702 and backdoor searches of Americans’ data… FBI agents can still collect, search, and review Americans’ communications without any review from a judge.”
Four House Democrats — Josh Gottheimer, Tom Suozzi, Marie Gluesencamp Perez, and Jared Golden — broke with their party earlier this month to support a procedural vote advancing reauthorization. Privacy groups are pressuring them to oppose the latest extension.
“It all comes down to those four and where they are going to land,” Hajar Hammado, a senior policy adviser at Demand Progress, told The Intercept. “and if they are going to continue to try to hand Trump and [White House homeland security adviser] Stephen Miller warrantless surveillance authorities without any sort of checks or reforms that make sure they’re not violating civil liberties.”
-Common Dreams
