Here’s something unexpected. During the hearing, Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) asked to see the FISA Court rulings from earlier this year, in closed session, that McConnell and Wainstein and others have said required a probable-cause based warrant for purely foreign-to-foreign communications, prompting the August revision to FISA. McConnell’s lawyer, Benjamin Powell, said that as the rulings compounded this year, the intelligence community found itself “in a place” where more and more foreign communications became covered by FISA, contrary to the original language and intent of the act.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=179851