Congress advances bill to renew NSA surveillance program after Trump briefly upstages key vote

Senate leaders are planning to send to the president's desk next week a bill to reauthorize the government's authority to conduct foreign surveillance on U.S. soil, despite opposition from privacy advocates and mixed messages from President Trump himself, who questioned his own administration's support for the program Thursday morning.

The Senate voted 69 to 26 Thursday afternoon to start debating the bill, which would extend for six years the government's ability to collect from U.S. companies the emails and other communications of foreign targets located outside the United States. The vote came just hours after the House voted 256 to 164 to approve the legislation and is a sign that lawmakers intend to move swiftly to pass the measure before the program's statutory authority expires on Jan. 19.

The intelligence community considers the program, called Section 702 after the part of the 2008 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendments Act (FISA) that established it, to be its key national security surveillance tool. But privacy advocates oppose the law, arguing there are not enough limits on the government's ability to scour the database of collected information for the communications of Americans in touch with those foreign targets.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said Thursday that he intended to do "everything in my power, including filibuster," to impede the bill next week, but he is unlikely to block the bill's eventual passage. A House effort to amend the bill to require the federal government to obtain warrants before searching the database for Americans' information failed Thursday by a vote of 183 to 233.
Instead, the greater threat to the fate of Section 702 came from the president himself, in a series of contradictory and seemingly misinformed tweets he fired off after watching a segment about the bill on the Fox News Channel.

"'House votes on controversial FISA ACT today,'" Trump wrote, citing a Fox News headline. "This is the act that may have been used, with the help of the discredited and phony Dossier, to so badly surveil and abuse the Trump Campaign by the previous administration and others?"

Trump attempted to walk back the tweet about 90 minutes later, urging lawmakers to reauthorize the program. But top Democrats seized on the confusion, calling on Republican leaders to withdraw the bill from consideration "in light of the irresponsible and inherently contradictory messages coming out of the White House today," Rep. Adam B. Schiff (Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said on the floor.

Republicans seemed undeterred by Democrats' demands, plowing ahead with planned votes on the bill and a sole amendment to it Thursday morning. But behind the scenes, the president's mixed messages sent shock waves through the House GOP, which was gathered for a regular conference meeting when Trump sent his initial tweet.