UNITED STATES CONGRESSMAN Jim Himes, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, is privately lobbying colleagues to preserve the FBI’s power to conduct warrantless searches of Americans’ communications, WIRED has learned, arguing that he has seen no evidence that the Trump administration is abusing its authority.
In a letter obtained by WIRED, Himes urges fellow Democrats to support the White House’s request to renew a controversial surveillance program that intercepts the electronic data of foreigners abroad. While targeted at foreigners, the program—authorized under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act—also sweeps in vast quantities of private messages belonging to US citizens.
Himes’ pitch relies on the “56 reforms” passed by Congress in 2024, which codified the FBI’s own internal protocols as a substitute for constitutional warrants. In the letter, Himes claims these changes are “working as intended” to prevent domestic misuse, citing a compliance rate “exceeding 99 percent” over the past two years.
The structural foundations of that defense, however, have been fundamentally altered by recent changes within the FBI. Himes’ “99 percent” compliance metric was produced by the Office of Internal Auditing, for instance—a unit that long served as a smoke alarm designed to detect illegality, but no longer exists.
