Speaker Mike Johnson faces ANOTHER test of his leadership: Republican turmoil now threatens to derail renewal of controversial FBI foreign spy tool

Speaker Mike Johnson is making his pitch this week to colleagues to extend the intelligence community's warrantless surveillance authority.

A bill to renew Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) with new safeguards for transparency is expected to make its way to the House floor this week, but it's far from clear whether it will have wide Republican support.

Section 702 has been credited for helping intelligence officers thwart terror attacks on U.S. soil, but has also been prone to abuse with spying on U.S. citizens. 

It allows the U.S. government to surveil foreign nationals with suspected terror ties who are not on U.S. soil, even if the party on the other side of such communications is a U.S. national in America. 

Hardliners on the right and left have become strange bedfellows over accusations that FISA has trampled on Americans' civil liberties. 

Speaker Mike Johnson is making his pitch this week to colleagues to extend the intelligence community's warrantless surveillance authority

The Rules Committee is marking up and advancing a version of a renewal bill on Tuesday. 

The House-led bill released last week would extend the program while also adding new changes that are meant to bolster oversight and training and ensure the program's transparency. 

It won't include an amendment from Rep. Warren Davidson, R-Ohio, barring federal agencies from buying information on Americans from private data companies, rankling conservative hardliners, but leadership said that could get a standalone vote this week. 

In March a compromise bill that was put together by negotiators on the Judiciary and Intelligence Committees was abruptly yanked from the House floor schedule over concerns from the Intel Committee over an amendment that would have forced law enforcement to seek a warrant before obtaining communications that involved a U.S. citizen.

The provision requiring a warrant was not in the bill released on Friday but could get a vote as an amendment during debate. 

The coalition of progressives, privacy-minded lawmakers and libertarian-leaning Republicans could put up a fight over including the amendment in final bill text.

That coalition has seen its ranks after some high-profile missteps by the FBI, after agents were found to be querying communications for ex-partners, people involved in political activism and more. 

Johnson warned in a letter to colleagues last week that if the House fails to pass a FISA renewal bill yet again, the Senate could send over a 'clean' reauthorization with no new privacy guardrails. That would box the House into either passing that or letting the surveillance authority lapse. 

Intelligence officials said they used FISA to thwart weapons sales to Iran  

A report from May 2023 detailed how the FBI used Section 702 to 'query' - or search - names of individuals who were suspected of being on the Capitol grounds during the January 6, 2021 riot, Black Lives Matters protestors, victims of crime and their families and donors to one congressional campaign. 

In total, the FBI misused Section 702 over 278,000 times - according to the document.

While many of Section 702's uses remain classified, intelligence officials leaked late last year that they had used the controversial tool to thwart weapons sales to Iran. 

The CIA and other intelligence agencies had used information gathered through monitoring the electronic communications of foreign weapons manufacturers and stopping several shipments of advanced weapons to Iran.