At one time House Speaker Mike Johnson wanted to add a warrant requirement to the controversial spying program, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
This is the same law used against President Trump in the Russiagate hoax.
But now Speaker Johnson has flip-flopped.
So what changed Johnson’s mind?
Just one meeting with the deep state. That’s all it took. Watch:
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‘Fully Informed’
Johnson had previously admitted that he had seen all kinds of abuse from the FBI during testimony in the House Judiciary Committee. But again, all it took was just one meeting to snap him back in line.
“I encourage all the members to go to the classified briefing and hear all that and see it, so they can evaluate the situation for themselves,” Johnson said on Thursday. “I think some opinions have changed both ways, but that’s part of the process. You got to be fully informed.”
On Wednesday, 19 Republicans joined 209 Democrats to block reforms to FISA’s Section 702, which allows U.S. intelligence to collect texts, phone calls, emails and other electronic communications of foreigners in foreign countries.
The problem with that is that Americans’ data has also been captured in the past.
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Pushback
Many were not satisfied with Johnson’s explanation and still want a warrant requirement, as required by the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution.
Edward Snowden in particular. The famous whistleblower wrote on X, “This is a textbook case of Congressional capture. With a single briefing, the intelligence agencies routinely transform their most strident critics into the tamest of cheerleaders.”
Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz said on his podcast, “I told the speaker, my friend, that we made him speaker so that the speakership would be more like Mike Johnson. We didn’t make Mike Johnson speaker so that Mike Johnson would be more like the speakership.”
“We’ve been on the Judiciary Committee with Mike Johnson. He sat next to me for seven years on that committee. Frankly, Mike Johnson makes the arguments that we’ve made in this [FISA] discussion, probably better than we do,” Gaetz said. “If what he has encountered from an information standpoint, as speaker was so persuasive, that it would cause him to make a reversal, that I would think he would be obligated to convince his colleagues from the Judiciary Committee.”
Former Republican congressman and current candidate for U.S. Senate, Justin Amash, had his own thoughts.
Sharing Johnson’s remarks on X, Amash wrote, “Translation: “When I was a member of Judiciary, I saw the abuses of the FBI, hundreds of thousands of abuses. And then when I became speaker, I got the confidential briefing from a different perspective: They said if I didn’t support FISA, I wouldn’t be speaker for much longer.”
That sounds about how Washington works.
Matt Gaetz has a point. If Republicans supported Mike Johnson as Speaker to pushback on official Washington, why is the new Speaker rolling over for the establishment almost immediately?
For all the hyperventilating in the media about how Trump “controls” Republicans in Congress, he doesn’t hold a candle to the power of the deep state.
