FISA: Trump Said He'd Risk Your Rights So the Military Can Fight an Unconstitutional War
Donald Trump's pivot from demanding FISA abolition to supporting its extension reveals a betrayal of his campaign promises and the Constitution. While distinguishing between Title I warrants and Section 702 warrantless surveillance, critics argue this distinction ignores historical abuses exposed by James Clapper and Michael Hayden, where no criminal referrals followed Snowden leaks. The segment condemns claims that the military needs these powers for an unconstitutional war against Iran, labeling generals as bureaucrats following unlawful orders. Ultimately, the discussion frames such government overreach, alongside initiatives like Common Core, as tools of control threatening individual dignity, urging listeners to resist partisan gamesmanship in favor of principled constitutional adherence. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Dirty FISA Denies Constitution00:15:02
Trump is pushing what he calls a clean FISA reauthorization as the deadline is nearing.
Folks, there's nothing at all clean about FISA.
It is a dirty denial of the Constitution as well as search warrants.
When it was being done against him, he understood.
This is what is so characteristic of both parties, right?
They embrace the tyranny when it's coming from their tribe.
But they oppose it when it's coming from the other people, simply because they oppose the other people, not because they have any principles whatsoever.
It's just another lie, another betrayal of his campaign promises, as well as a betrayal of the Constitution and his oath to the Constitution.
Who would have thought that he would have betrayed his oath to the Constitution when he's on his third wife?
And it isn't just a divorce which has become very commonplace in our society.
No, no, no, not Trump.
When he divorces you or he fires you, he comes after you after the fact.
Trump, who just two years ago called on Congress to, quote, kill FISA, and he did it in all uppercase, is now pushing for his extension.
House Republicans are divided.
Some are seeking to attach the reauthorization to the Save America Act, which, as the New American correctly points out, is an unconstitutional proposal that would expand federal control over elections.
Trump acknowledged past abuses.
You know, when he was not in power, FISA was an abusive thing, and he was concerned about it.
We should all be concerned about it because it's Mr. and Mrs. America that are out there.
FISA Title I targets specific individuals inside the United States and requires a warrant from the FISA court.
Section 702, by contrast, authorizes warrantless surveillance of foreign targets abroad, with Americans' communications also being collected.
Trump is now treating that distinction as if it were sufficient.
It's not.
Despite the comprehensive record of abuses that have been tied to Section 702 itself.
I think it was a big tell, by the way, you know, when we had.
James Clapper got on, and James Clapper said, You know, it was asked directly by Ron Wyden.
And again, I mentioned Ron Wyden, and I'll just say this for people who are listening who don't write me about how bad Ron Wyden is.
I know he's bad in a lot of different ways.
But he got that one thing right.
And he asked him that question point blank.
And you all remember how James Clapper hemmed and hawed, and, uh, uh, well, uh, Senator, uh, uh, not intentionally.
And then you had Michael Hayden, he said, I blame Ron Wyden.
He and his staff and every one of the staff and senators on that committee knew we were doing that.
Knew they were violating the law and the Constitution.
And he said, and he put him on the spot.
Yeah, but you know what they didn't do?
They never had a criminal referral for him committing perjury in his testimony to Congress.
And he did.
They never had a criminal referral for him violating the law and the Constitution.
And he did.
And Michael Hayden said that he did.
Michael Hayden was upset with Ron Wyden for pointing out that James Clapper had violated that.
And we found out right away within a couple of months we had the Snowden leaks that showed over and over again what they were actually doing.
But there were never any consequences.
The statute of limitations expired.
I mean, that was in 2013.
Statute of limitations expired in 2018, expired seven years ago.
Nothing has changed.
And they're still wanting to reauthorize this.
Just to review real quickly, why do we have FISA?
Well, you remember the, everybody remembers the Frank Church Committee hearings on the CIA, where they held up the heart attack gun and they talked about assassination attempts in Cuba and other places that the CIA had been doing.
That was sensationalist misdirection because the hearings began because the government was doing warrantless searches.
They were doing it right after World War II.
As soon as they crafted this vicious thing called national security, Everything must be sacrificed to national security.
Our lives, our economy, our freedoms, everything sacrificed to this thing called national security, which is not about security at all.
It's about continuity of government.
It's about an American empire.
It's about the military industrial complex, or as I prefer to call it, the Machiavellian industrial complex.
That's what national security is about.
And so they had these hearings, and in the Senate, it was Frank Church who did it.
And they had hearings at the same time in the House, and it was the Pike Committee hearings.
And they were in the House, they were looking at the NSA.
In the Senate, they were looking at the CIA.
Nobody really covered the NSA because you're not supposed to know that it existed at that point in time.
Everybody would joke and say it was no such agency.
How well known was the agency in 1975, Mr. Schwartz?
Well, hardly at all.
The NSA, the joke was that NSA stood for no such agency.
That was still the case in the early 1980s when I worked with a guy who used to work for the NSA and was then working with Texas Instruments, and he would just joke about it.
I can't talk about it.
And it was created by executive order, NSA was, of Harry Truman.
And the head of the NSA was called in by Pike, and he said, I'd like to see your charter.
I'm not going to show that to you, Congressman.
Really?
Well, you're not even going to show it.
No, I'm not even going to show you the charter.
And the press obligingly said nothing about that hearing.
Both of those hearings were about warrantless surveillance of Americans.
And so they came up with the FISA Act, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
We say, well, we need to be able to do intelligence on foreigners and spies and that type of thing.
However, you're going to have to get a search warrant if you're going to spy on foreigners in America.
You can't do warrantless surveillance even on foreigners that you suspect of spying without a search warrant.
And so we're going to, we don't want to have that in a public court.
So we're going to create a secret court for you to get your search warrant.
And then it turned into what Rand Paul pointed out is a search warrant for Mr. and Mrs. Verizon.
It's just a blanket general warrant for them to do whatever they wish.
And it's very easy in these star chamber situations, the so called FISA court.
It's just a single judge.
And you go before that judge and say, I'd like to be able to say, oh, sure.
You know, it's just a rubber stamp process.
It doesn't mean anything.
And it gets even worse when you look at Section 702.
As William Benny, when I interviewed him about this, he said, well, you know, they claim that they can do search warrants with one or two hops or whatever from the person that they're looking at that is abroad.
And he goes, well, when you look at that, you can go one or two hops.
That gets to be a large number of people.
And it's basically not having any restriction at all.
So, Trump, when he was talking about it, he said, Well, this is, he said, the military desperately needs FISA 702.
I don't care.
You know, you can always make these cases.
We need to get rid of the due process.
We need to get rid of warrants.
Because, you know, the military, not just the military, but the police need to be able to do their work.
We don't want to put obstacles in their way.
No, actually, you do want to put obstacles in their way.
You don't want to have a government whose objective is to make the work of the police effortless.
That creates a police state by definition.
And so he says the military, quote, desperately needs FISA 702.
And he went on and he said it is vital.
And he claimed that generals support it without exception.
I don't care.
The generals are nothing but bureaucrats at this point, and they don't respect freedom, they don't respect the rule of law.
I mean, if you're still a general in the Trump regime, you're somebody who's willing to follow illegal orders, unlawful orders, orders in violation of the Constitution.
Those are the generals that we have now.
So he says he tied it to battlefield success, including the unconstitutional war against Iran, says the New American, and it is an unconstitutional war.
And that's not going to give them success.
They're not having success.
Here's the situation, right?
I thought he'd already succeeded.
He keeps telling us he's won the war, and then he keeps attacking people for not helping him.
He demands to have the ability to do warrantless searches on American citizens so they can win an unconstitutional war in Iran.
How is that anything other than a non sequitur?
While parts of FISA were illegal and unfortunately used against me, I am willing to risk that as a citizen in order to do what is right for our country.
I'm willing to risk your rights as citizens.
I'm willing to deny your rights as citizens.
I'm willing to destroy the Constitution for the military.
Peace president, my behind.
This guy is Lindsey Graham.
Somewhere they killed him and replaced him with Lindsey Graham in a mask, I think.
Or maybe they.
Resurrected John McCain, and that's what I was about to say.
You know, he didn't die, it was all a plot.
Yeah, it's uh, here, this is John McCain and drag.
Uh, yeah, Trump needs to be removed, the GOP needs to be removed as well.
You could just start over.
It'd be great if we had third party and independent choices, but the two parties have been so corrupt for so long that they made sure that they weren't going to have any competition from third parties or from independents.
So, the only thing you can do is vote them out in mass.
And hope that when the replacements come in, they will have learned a lesson and they'll be different people.
I mean, that's the way I see it.
Maybe you see it differently.
But I've never been more burn it down in my life.
I wouldn't just burn this party down, the GOP.
Freedom Caucus, as a matter of fact, is the House GOP's hardline conservative bloc, says the New American.
But they're not such hardline conservatives after all.
It turns out that although they've got 32 members, only about 12 of the 32 We'll vote for conservative principles.
The rest of them want to toe the party line.
Now, you know, this is a kind of a big tent House Freedom Caucus because it includes people like Randy Fine, this congressman, this Zionist extraordinaire from Florida, Randy Fine, who wants to destroy people's free speech and punish, you know, create hate speech if you criticize a foreign government.
That's Randy Fine.
He's a member of the House Freedom Caucus.
So they don't really check your credentials at the door.
Anybody can get in.
This is easier to get in than a speakeasy.
Of course, Randy Fine doesn't want you to be able to speak easily, does he?
More than a dozen House GOP holdouts have expressed opposition to the extension, citing concerns that the law undermines Americans' privacy if their data is inadvertently swept up while the U.S. government is collecting text and emails of foreigners abroad.
CIA Director John Ratcliffe wants it.
Dan Kaine, the guy who is the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wants it.
He describes Section 702 as critical to U.S. warfighters.
I just got to say, with all the weapons and all the computers and everything these guys have got, if they can't win a war without spying on the American people, shut down the Pentagon.
You guys haven't won a war since World War II.
You ought to all be gone anyway.
You're nothing but a bunch of grifting bureaucrats, in my opinion.
Grifting bureaucrats that are willing to send young Americans into the meat grinder over and over and over and destroy the Constitution and the rule of law.
National security, folks, has been the hammer.
That they have used to crush, to dust the Constitution over and over again.
Chip Roy ultimately caved on this as well.
Just so you know, Representatives Andy Biggs and Eli Crane, both of Arizona, filed an amendment to the committee to require a warrant for person queries.
Well, wouldn't that be nice?
You got to have an amendment for something that is a core value of the Constitution Bill of Rights.
That's where we are today, folks.
The Constitution, the Bill of Rights are dead unless we have some kind of a rider that's put in to resurrect part of it.
The Democrat position is shifting.
Democrats like Representative Jamie Raskin from Maryland, the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, who previously supported Section 702, is now calling for tighter constraints under a Republican administration.
So Trump opposes it when the Democrats are in charge, Jamie Raskin opposes it when the Republicans are in charge.
It's nothing other than partisan gamesmanship.
Neither of them have any principles.
Not Trump, not Jamie Raskin.
Jamie Raskin is looking at this and saying, well, I don't like what the Trump administration was doing with ICE.
He calls it domestic terrorism.
I agree.
I agree.
But you understand that this can happen with anyone, any political party.
They're not willing to stand on principle and they're not willing to obey the Constitution that they took an oath to as a condition of their office.
Common Man vs Control00:01:07
Common man.
They created common core to dumb down our children.
They created common past to track and control us.
Their commons project to make sure the commoners own nothing.
And the communist future.
They see the common man as simple, unsophisticated, ordinary.
But each of us has worth and dignity created in the image of God.
That is what we have in common.
That is what they want to take away.
Their most powerful weapons are isolation, deception, intimidation.
They desire to know everything about us while they hide everything from us.
It's time to turn that around and expose what they want to hide.
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