Mike Lee Went to Bat for Trump and Dragged These Democrats With Him

The FBI used a secret surveillance law to spy on Donald Trump's 2016 campaign – and not one agent went to prison.

That same law expires in 46 days, and Congress is about to vote on whether to hand it back.

One senator just made a move that nobody in Washington saw coming.

The FISA Section 702 Surveillance Tool Democrats Used Against Trump

Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was sold to the American people as a terrorism-fighting weapon.

The pitch was simple: let the NSA collect communications from foreign targets overseas without going to court every single time.

That sounds reasonable.

Here's what they didn't tell you.

When those foreign targets communicate with Americans, your texts, emails, and phone calls get swept up too.

And once the government has your communications sitting in a database, they can search it – without a warrant – any time they want.

In 2021 alone, the FBI ran 3.4 million of those warrantless searches.

Three point four million.

Think about what that number actually means.

That's not chasing terrorists.

That's a surveillance dragnet pointed at ordinary Americans.

The FISA Court – which exists specifically to oversee this program – issued opinions in 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2022 blasting the FBI for what it called "persistent and widespread" violations of its own rules.

FBI agents ran searches on Black Lives Matter protesters.

They ran searches on 19,000 donors to a single congressional campaign.

They ran searches on journalists, political commentators, and sitting members of Congress.

And then – the one that should make every Trump supporter's blood boil – the FBI used FISA to spy on Carter Page, a Trump campaign advisor, based on a dossier the Clinton campaign paid for and an FBI lawyer who altered government emails to make the spying look legal.

James Comey signed the warrant applications.

Nobody went to prison.

The SAFE Act Would Require FBI Warrants Before Reading Your Private Messages

Section 702 expires on April 20, 2026 – six weeks from now.

The White House is pushing for a "clean extension" – meaning zero new restrictions, the exact same rules that allowed the FBI to run millions of warrantless searches against Americans.

Tom Cotton called it "vital national security" and endorsed it immediately.

Mike Lee called it what it actually is.

"From warrantless searches targeting journalists, political commentators, and campaign donors to monitoring sitting members of Congress, these infringements reveal a blatant disregard for individual liberties," Lee said.

The Security and Freedom Enhancement Act would require the government to get a real warrant before reading the content of any American's communications swept up under Section 702.

The bill also closes the data broker loophole – the trick where intelligence agencies purchase Americans' location data and private information from commercial data brokers to get around the Fourth Amendment entirely.

You can't buy your way around the Constitution.

That's not a radical position.

That's the document.

The most remarkable thing about this bill isn't what's in it.

It's who's standing next to Lee when he introduces it.

Dick Durbin – one of the most reliably left-wing members of the Senate, a man who has disagreed with Mike Lee on virtually every major issue for two decades – is the co-sponsor.

When Mike Lee and Dick Durbin agree that the FBI has been spying on Americans without a warrant, that's not a political opinion.

That's a verdict.

Why the Deep State Wants You Looking the Other Way

The FBI has been promising to fix its FISA abuses since 2016.

After each documented violation – and there were hundreds of thousands of them – the bureau announced new training, new rules, new oversight.

It kept happening anyway.

Kash Patel was the congressional investigator who first cracked open the Carter Page surveillance scandal in 2018.

He's now the FBI director.

He knows exactly what that surveillance apparatus can do – because he watched Democrats use it against the man who just gave him his job.

The intelligence agencies – with full support from establishment Republicans in the Senate – are betting they can get Trump to sign a clean extension before the April 20 deadline.

Tom Cotton is already running that play.

Speaker Mike Johnson infuriated conservatives in 2024 when he cast the deciding vote to kill a warrant requirement – switching his position after spending years on the Judiciary Committee demanding surveillance guardrails.

The same fight is coming again.

But this time the FBI director is Kash Patel – the man who cracked open the Carter Page surveillance scandal in 2018 while the entire Washington establishment called him a liar.

He knows better than anyone alive what this surveillance apparatus can do to a political target.

And Attorney General Pam Bondi has already told Congress under oath that the Trump administration is committed to ending warrantless searches of Americans' communications.

Neither Bondi nor Patel have been exactly stellar thus far in the Trump administration but this could be their chance to get back on track if they have the stones.

The deep state built the machine that tried to destroy Trump.

Mike Lee just introduced the bill that dismantles it.

---

Sources:

• Sean Moran, "Mike Lee Introduces Bipartisan Bill to Protect Americans Against Warrantless Spying," Breitbart, February 24, 2026.
• Sen. Mike Lee Press Release, "Lee-Durbin Introduce Bipartisan Protections Against Warrantless Data Searches," lee.senate.gov, February 24, 2026.
• "Warrants to Spy on Trump Campaign Lacked Probable Cause, DOJ Admits," The Heritage Foundation, 2020.
• "Trump Orders FBI to Declassify Documents from 'Crossfire Hurricane' Russia Investigation," Fox News, March 2025.
• Sen. Chuck Grassley Press Release, "Newly Declassified Appendix to Durham Report," grassley.senate.gov, 2025.
• "White House Seeks Clean Extension on Controversial Spying Law," Nextgov/FCW, February 2026.