OPINION: This article contains commentary which reflects the author's opinion
Attorney General William Barr has been very busy lately getting to the bottom of the Obama administration spying on the Trump campaign and trying to prevent Trump from winning the 2016 election.
There have been several major developments in recent weeks, but now one major group is getting involved and going after California Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff.
According to Gizmodo, dozens of civil liberty groups have accused Schiff of violating the online privacy of U.S. citizens and allege the lawmaker may be doing it to conceal the unlawful surveillance of Americans’ web browsing activity by the FBI’s national security branch.
The groups released an official letter addressed to some of the most powerful Republicans and Democrats, accusing Schiff of taking part in “unauthorized dragnet surveillance of people in the United States.”
They claim that the FBI is abusing wiretaps and other tools that were used under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
Gizmodo reported:
In a letter on Wednesday addressed to top Democrats and Republicans, a coalition of left- and right-leaning advocacy groups said that “alarming statements and actions” by leaders of the House and Senate intelligence committees have prompted concerns about potential “unauthorized dragnet surveillance of people in the United States,” which may have relied on authorities that expired this March amid debate over the use of roving wiretaps and other key surveillance tools authorized under FISA, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
Recently, two Democratic lawmakers penned a letter saying that top government officials and members of Congress using or relying on a 1980s executive order to surveil on Americans would be “plainly illegal“:
In a letter to Barr and Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe last month, Senators Patrick Leahy and Mike Lee wrote that the “executive branch has tenuously relied on Executive Order 12333, issued in 1981, to conduct surveillance operations wholly independent of any statutory authority.” The senators said that because the FISA reauthorization bill had failed to pass, they are now concerned the U.S. government might be continuing to collect that intelligence absent congressional approval. “This would constitute a system of surveillance with no congressional oversight potentially resulting in programmatic Fourth Amendment violations at tremendous scale,” they wrote, saying: “We strongly believe that such reliance on Executive Order 12333 would be plainly illegal.”
The letter from the groups is already gaining traction with members of Congress.
Ohio Republican Rep. Warren Davidson responded to the letter calling out Schiff.
“I completely agree with the coalition’s letter. I have numerous concerns about ongoing surveillance, especially given Rep. Schiff’s assertions. Congress and the American people have a right to know the extent of the surveillance the government is conducting, especially if good-faith efforts to reform those authorities are undermined by unconstitutional actions on the part of the intelligence community,” Davidson said.
The FISA act is the same one FBI agents used to target President Donald Trump’s campaign.