Bitterness toward federal law enforcement emboldened by President Donald Trump since 2016 is holding up a vote to reauthorize a core tenet of the United States’ foreign surveillance law.
Congressional Republicans, facing an ever-nearing April deadline to renew Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, still can’t agree on how to reform the law. Why? Republicans say it boils down to mounting distrust around the FBI, an institution that has been the subject of partisan outrage since the Trump presidency.
“Ninety percent of the problem here is, frankly, loss of trust in the FBI,” Sen. Marco Rubio, the top Republican on the Senate’s committee on intelligence, said of the stalemate over Section 702.