At Tuesday's House Judiciary Committee hearing, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) accused the FBI of breaking their own rules on searching Americans.
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00:00Chairman of the full committee, Mr. Jordan. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act allows government to conduct surveillance of foreigners, as the title would suggest, outside of the United States for intelligence information.
00:17Okay, that's all well and good. We like that. They get that information, they bring in this giant database, what I call the haystack of information, and then they do queries, which is a fancy word for search.
00:30And they search Americans. American phone numbers, names, email addresses. They search Americans. They call it queries, but a query is a fancy name. Query is a fancy name for search.
00:41Three million times they did it in 2021. And here's the kicker. The FBI, when they did all these searches, didn't even follow their own rules.
00:51You don't have to take our word for it. The inspector general said 278,000 times the FBI didn't even follow their rules for conducting these searches on Americans, not foreigners.
01:03So the ranking member's right. We got 12 months from now where we get a chance to go at this issue again. We were close last time. We lost a warrant requirement in a vote, 212 to 212.
01:15I'm going to do everything, and I know the chairman is, and I appreciate the ranking member's comments.
01:20We're going to do everything we can to make sure we have that warrant requirement. Here's the way it works in our country.
01:25If you're an American citizen and the government wants to go look at your stuff, they got to go to a separate equal branch of government and get a warrant.
01:31It's pretty simple. That's what we want. Plain and simple. And we were one vote away from passing it in the House.
01:40Who knows what would happen in the Senate? But I know I'm committed.
01:45I know the chairman of the subcommittee is committed and the ranking member.
01:49I appreciate what he's done over the years in defending the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and we look forward to working with him on this issue.
01:55We need to do this to protect American citizens and stick with, as the ranking member said, the way it's always worked.
02:03You want to look at someone's stuff? Go get a warrant. Go to a separate branch of government? Get a warrant.
02:07That's how probable cause. And here's the other thing. We even put exceptions in there, exigent circumstances,
02:14something really bad is going to happen, or you give permission because there's some cyber attack on you or your company.
02:19We put exceptions in there. We'll put them back in again. Sometimes I thought we put too many exceptions.
02:24We'll do it again, but we've got to win. We've got to win this issue 12 months from now, April.
02:32I forget the date in April, but it's April next year, and we've got to make sure we win this.
02:36And I appreciate the chairman bringing our witnesses here.
02:38Thank you for coming and having this hearing on this very important, fundamental, fundamental issue for the American people.
02:44I yield back.
02:44Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
02:46Thank you, Mr. Chairman.