Exclusive: Top House Democrat Pushes to Protect FBI Warrantless Surveillance Power Despite Trump Administration Oversight Gutting
United States House Intelligence Committee’s top Democrat Jim Himes is privately lobbying congressional colleagues to preserve the FBI’s authority to run warrantless searches of American citizens’ private communications, WIRED has learned. Himes argues he has uncovered no evidence the second Trump administration has misused this surveillance power to date.
In a private letter to fellow Democrats obtained by WIRED, Himes urges his party to back the White House’s request to reauthorize a controversial surveillance program that intercepts electronic data of foreign targets located overseas. While the program—authorized under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)—is formally targeted at non-Americans, it routinely sweeps up massive volumes of private communications belonging to U.S. citizens.
Himes’ case for reauthorization relies on the “56 reforms” Congress passed in 2024, which codified the FBI’s internal protocols as a replacement for constitutionally required warrants for domestic searches. In the letter, Himes claims these changes are “working as intended” to block improper domestic surveillance, citing a compliance rate “exceeding 99 percent” recorded over the past two years.
The core of this defense, however, has been fundamentally undermined by recent sweeping changes within the FBI. For example, the 99 percent compliance metric Himes cites was compiled by the FBI’s Office of Internal Auditing, a unit that long functioned as an early warning system to detect illegal surveillance activity. That unit no longer exists.
FBI Director Kash Patel shut down the internal auditing division last year. Prior secret court rulings built on its data had already exposed hundreds of thousands of improper FBI searches of American data. Without the independent auditors tasked with tracking compliance failures, the oversight mechanisms Himes points to have effectively ceased operating.
In a formal statement, Himes’ office largely repeated the positions laid out in his letter to colleagues. “I am open to making further reforms to Section 702, building on the many successful reforms we made in reauthorization legislation two years ago,” he said. “A short-term reauthorization of Section 702 will enable Congress to thoroughly debate the pros and cons of these suggested reforms—and to determine if compromise is possible—without placing our national security in peril by allowing the program to expire.”
As a member of the bipartisan Gang of Eight, the small group of lawmakers cleared for the most sensitive classified intelligence briefings, Himes has among the deepest access to information about the spy program. Even so, several key claims in his letter directly contradict how FISA oversight actually works.
“Because of how heavily it is overseen by all three branches of government,” Himes writes, “any effort to misuse the program would almost certainly become known to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and to Congress.”
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) is a secret body with no independent investigative arm to audit the FBI’s databases. Similar to Congress, its oversight role is purely reactive, relying entirely on the U.S. Department of Justice to self-report compliance violations.
“Neither Congress nor the FISA Court conducts independent audits of the FBI’s queries,” says Liza Goitein, senior director of the Brennan Center's Liberty and National Security Program. “They rely on the Department of Justice to conduct thorough audits and to report the results truthfully and promptly. This particular Department of Justice has gutted internal oversight mechanisms and has been rebuked by dozens of federal courts for providing inaccurate, misleading, or incomplete information.”
No judge stands between the FBI and the private communications of millions of Americans, a setup Himes and other committee leaders argue is necessary to let the government respond quickly to terrorist threats. Critics warn that, given the current administration’s push to dismantle internal checks at the FBI, this gap creates a massive vulnerability that leaves Americans exposed to surveillance abuses that could take years to declassify—if they are ever reported at all.
No members of Congress are actively calling to end the entire Section 702 program; even its harshest critics acknowledge its critical intelligence value. Supporters of constitutional privacy safeguards have also built in accommodations for fast national security responses: bills that require a warrant for accessing American data—like the recently introduced Government Surveillance Reform Act—consistently include broad emergency exceptions.
Under that bill, if a threat is imminent or lives are at immediate stake, agents can still quickly access required intelligence without prior judicial approval. It also includes exceptions for defensive cybersecurity work, allowing the government to search for malicious code or hacking infrastructure without a warrant. Under the proposed privacy reforms, the FBI would only be barred from running warrantless searches of American data for espionage investigations. Because espionage is a slow-moving, rarely violent threat, agents would be required to obtain a warrant from a court in advance.
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Existing safeguards for the program rely on independent judgment from FBI attorneys and supervisors to approve sensitive searches. But under last year’s federal workforce overhaul, employees in these legal and management roles had key civil service protections stripped away. Failing to “implement administrative policies” is now a fireable offense.
This change has effectively eliminated the independence of the FBI’s middle management, a blow compounded by widespread politically motivated firings. According to a federal lawsuit filed by former high-ranking FBI officials, Patel privately acknowledged many of these firings were “likely illegal.”
As a result, the “high-level approval” process Himes cites as a key protection against abuse now functions as a mechanism for political loyalists to approve surveillance of domestic targets that align with the administration’s political agenda.
Himes has directly addressed these concerns in his letter to colleagues, writing: “We fundamentally lack faith in Trump administration leaders. The administration has shown an appalling willingness to violate laws and flout norms in both foreign and domestic affairs.” He adds that if he were aware of the administration abusing its surveillance authority, he would not urge members to reauthorize the program. “I have not seen evidence of misuse, despite being on the lookout for any hint of it,” he said.
Recent public disclosures from 2025 and 2026 already detail a string of FBI surveillance abuses and oversight violations, all occurring after the 2024 reforms Himes touts. According to a FISA court opinion released last fall, FBI personnel deployed a tool that ran searches of Americans’ data that were never logged or audited. In October, the Justice Department’s own inspector general’s office noted in a report that, “in view of the history of the FBI’s Section 702 compliance issues, we are not able to conclude based on that limited time period that the FBI’s querying compliance issues are entirely in the past.”
The current administration has also raided the homes of journalists, infiltrated private chat groups of activists monitoring immigration raids, and redirected counterterrorism resources toward domestic political groups. As recently as last month, Himes skipped Trump’s State of the Union address, posting on Facebook that the president and “his administration are blatantly corrupt, [have] shattered our democratic norms, and broken precedent time and time again.”
In 2024, Himes and other surveillance hawks successfully convinced Congress to reject adding any constitutional warrant guardrails to the Section 702 program. Both he and the bureau—then led by Christopher Wray—argued that requiring high-level supervisor approval for sensitive searches was all that was needed to prevent abuse by rogue agents.
While Himes’ letter cites the 56 reforms implemented two years ago, not all of them apply to the FBI’s access to American data. Of those that do apply, a significant number only add minor bureaucratic friction to the search process, making it administratively tedious for rank-and-file agents to run a query. The FBI says this goal was achieved by cutting the pool of authorized search users by roughly 90 percent. At the same time, as WIRED first reported, former FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate issued a 2024 directive urging agents to actively run more queries on Americans to justify the program’s continued existence.
Other remaining reforms Himes cites are largely procedural: they require deputy FBI director approval for searches targeting elected officials, journalists, and religious leaders, and require agents to type a justification into a text box and click an extra confirmation button to launch a search. The process is enforced entirely by the FBI’s own system administrators, implemented after the bureau repeatedly blamed past improper searches on agents it claimed were unaware they were accessing Section 702 data.
Himes’ letter goes on to say that “because of how Section 702 is structured, it is not an especially good vehicle for abuse.” But the program’s history is rife with proven abuse.
“According to the government’s own audits, FBI agents have searched for the communications of members of Congress, protesters from across the political spectrum, journalists, and congressional campaign donors,” says Goitein.
The Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) voted this week to formally oppose reauthorization without meaningful reform, binding its 98 members to vote no on a clean extension of the 702 program. In a statement, CPC chair Greg Casar said Democrats should not be “handing them massive surveillance powers they will abuse.”
Representative Pramila Jayapal, a Judiciary Committee member and longtime privacy advocate, warned that the Trump administration has already demonstrated a willingness to use surveillance tools against domestic political targets, citing the Justice Department’s reported monitoring of lawmakers’ search histories during the review of the Jeffrey Epstein files.
Despite these warnings, congressional sources say Himes is currently seeking approval from Democratic leadership to cut a deal with Republicans to pass a clean reauthorization, asking for no reform concessions in return.
"I think it's incredibly dumb for Democrats to give away leverage," one congressional staffer familiar with the negotiations said on condition of anonymity. "Especially on a bill that is very controversial, given all the domestic spying by this administration."
